


The Art of Separation and Abandonment

by WritingYay



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Abandonment, Break Up, Bucky takes on the captain america mantle, Complicated Relationships, Emotional Hurt, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Established Relationship, Getting Together, Happy Ending, Hatred, Hurt No Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, Jealousy, Kidnapping, Love, M/M, Memory Loss, Pain, Post-CACW, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Prompt Fill, Sequel, Swearing, Tony Needs a Hug, Torture, Trans Character, Trauma, Violence, Vomiting, friendships, multi-chapter, this is gonna hurt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-28
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2019-11-07 05:52:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 28,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17954807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WritingYay/pseuds/WritingYay
Summary: "So let me get this straight," Nat flaps her hands around in irritation and Tony sighs heavily. "To get over Steve, your ex-boyfriend who is marrying somebody else and living his best life in Ireland, you are planning to turn his broken best-friend into the Captain America you wish Steve would've been?""No." Tony retorts, slightly horrified. "Absolutely not.""Yes-" Sam interrupts with a more serious tone than was strictly necessary. "That is exactly what's happening here."-For the amazing Liahnel, without who this lil' project wouldn't exist.





	1. Whole lotta' issues

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Liahnel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liahnel/gifts).



> Right!
> 
> Before you begin, this multi-chapter project is essentially a continuation of my previous fic, 'It Could've Been Great'. It might be a good idea to skim that before starting this, just so you have a slight idea of what is going on...
> 
> This is a Winteriron fic with past (and complicated) Steve/Tony. It is post-CACW (so post-Accords) and Bucky starts as an outsider to the Avengers. I probably won't allude to Tony's parents in this, so don't worry about the did he/didn't he kill them with Bucky as it's not relevant.
> 
> Get ready for a whole lot of feelings and some deep emotion. It's about to get real, y'all. 
> 
> This was also heavily inspired (as a sort-of prompt plea) from Liahnel so the main plot is completely credited to them. Enjoy :)

They get the tip-off exactly five months and eighteen days after the awful event that unfolded during the market fiasco.

Natasha reaches over the Quinjet cockpit console to squeeze Tony’s knee comfortingly. It takes him a heartbeat for him to realise that she’s in fact trying to calm down his leg, which is bouncing and quivering out of its own accord as the plane slices through the clouds.

“Sorry.” He mutters with an apologetic shrug, hating how pity shines openly in Nat’s eyes. She sends him a small smile back but doesn’t try to make light of his apprehension. She’s not stupid. Even a passive assassin as good as her was not immune to the choking tension furling throughout the enclosed space.

Clint sidles up behind them both to peer through the glass. “How long now?”

“Fuck knows-” Tony bites out and turns his head to address the digitally generated model of a very serious Rhodey tapping away on a laptop. “Rhodes? How far, pal?”

There’s a pause as Rhodey- safe from the chaos in Santa Monica with the government- looks down at his own screen to track the data. “Uh,” he says uncertainly and looks back up to the trio with a wince. “You’ll be there in five by our calculations.”

Five minutes. Oh god, no.

Nausea washes through Tony’s stomach like a wave of bleach and he slips his eyes closed for a heartbeat to count the luminescent dots of dizziness billowing in his sub-conscious. He knows, goddamnit, that Clint and Nat are silently communicating worriedly to each other while they think he can’t see them. He can. He’s aware of everything: of every tiny movement, of every hesitation, of every act of betrayal-

Everything Steve used to do to give his emotions away in the lead up to the familial stability they’d managed to construct at the compound exploding like motherfucking fireworks. 

A warm hand settles on the ridge of his neck and he blinks back to reality sluggishly. It had been nearly three years after Steve had abandoned them and the team was still treating him like he was woven from glass. 

“Don’t do this.” Nat whispers to him, her voice barely loud enough for Tony’s sleep-deprived and painkiller-addled brain to comprehend. Don’t lose yourself to the memories, is what she actually means and _fuck come on_ , Tony needed to pull himself together.

“I’m all good, Nat.” He manages to grind out and tilts his chin upwards to plaster a smirk onto his lips for good measure. Nat’s frown just falls deeper as she surveys his panicked eyes with a heavy sigh. “Just working out a battle plan.”

“It’s shit that Steve isn’t here.” Clint throws in with a tone too flippant to be ignorant. He knows what he’s doing, they all do. They’re trying to work out if he’s stable enough to do this mission without losing him to three years of excruciating pain and heartbreak. “He’s literally the best method we could’ve used to deal with this.”

“You know where Steve is.” Tony reminds him with an underlying warning that freezes the atmosphere in the cockpit for a second. “And no, we don’t need him for this. There’s me, you, Nat, Bruce, Thor and Sam. Oh, and Rhodey, even though the useless son of a bitch isn’t actually here. Six against one, Clint. It’ll be fine.”

Metaphysical-Rhodey glares dangerously at his best-friend but wisely doesn’t challenge him.

“Clint’s right.” Nat continues and settles back into her chair delicately. Her fingers entwine together in her lap; twisting and contorting tightly together to momentarily cut off the blood supply to her nails. They slip into a sickening grey colour that represents death. Tony isn’t sure if it ironically reflects the fate they were undoubtedly walking into. “If this intel is correct, we’re walking into some fucking pure danger. Literally, if the promise of death was a person, it would be The Winter Soldier.”

The name sends icy pinpricks of chill screaming down Tony’s spine and he shivers involuntarily in the suit. 

“We don’t know if it’s the soldier or Barnes.” He reminds them. “The source couldn’t be sure- apparently they didn’t get a good look at the eyes.”

Nat makes a face of disgust and twists round in her seat to fasten a gun holster to her right ankle, just in case. “Still a creep.”

“I’m not opposing that,” Tony holds his hands out placatingly and notices with a resigned hiss that Rhodey was tapping faster on his laptop; a sure sign that they were going to land imminently. “I’m just re-iterating that we shouldn’t go in blind- Clint, make sure the others are good to go.” The archer disappears with an obedient salute, the sound of his voice rising above the plane engines to organise the team. “But as far as we know, the guy’s been in Wakanda with T’Challa since the Accords. Why he’s been spotted wandering around Romania, I don’t know.”

“Dr Banner made contact with the Wakandan King.” Thor’s booming dialect reverberates around the tiny space, his huge frame taking up the space Clint had just disappeared through. “Apparently His Highness was not aware that the Winter Soldier was missing.” The God’s features drop into a confused scowl. His hammer glares in the artificial lighting. “He sounded most… troubled.”

Nat snorts from Tony’s left and pushes the controls towards the nose of the Quinjet as the whole aircraft drops into a desperate descent. Tony grits his teeth and grasps onto the leather coverings of his seat. Thor just stands in the cockpit with Mjölnir standing upright on the floor to keep him steady as the jet plummets towards the arid landscape of the snow-capped Carpathian Mountains. His hair doesn’t move an inch, but Tony wants to throw up.

Nat lands the jet with minimal damage and Tony asks himself for the thirtieth time why he allowed her to pilot and not Sam.

“Avengers, let’s be smart about this.” He announces as they all exit the jet with tension thrumming through them. “We don’t know if we’re dealing with arguably the most dangerous mutated muscleman on the planet- bar Steve- or a bewildered 100-year old guy.”

“Standard _fuck we’re screwed_ battle protocol should apply for both outcomes though.” Nat chimes in, her gun poised to perfection. “I wouldn’t trust the man, scientific death weapon or not.”

Tony just gives her a look as they start traipsing through the mountains on foot. The information had been given to them by a terrified local woman who identified Bucky by recalling seeing his killings on the news. It wasn’t the most convincing tip-off they’d ever had, but it had sent the UN into meltdown regardless. 

“This is the dumbest mission we’ve ever been given.” Sam scoffs from somewhere behind Tony. “Why has Barnes suddenly become our problem again?”

“He’s still the UN’s issue,” Bruce interrupts placatingly; they unanimously decided that they’d only need Hulk if things turned really ugly. “But they conveniently decided that we’d be the best method at their disposal.”

Tony silences them with a flap of his hand. “Can we not get into this now?”

The Avengers continue around the base of a particularly treacherous looking mountain for a while. Nothing, not one indication that Bucky was anywhere to be seen.

They’re just about to give up and retreat to the warmth of the compound when Thor raises his hand in a display of warning. Tony fires up his repulsor with a click, as their gaggle of dangerous beings join Thor behind a rockface.

“I can hear something.” Thor mouths to them and Nat turns to Tony with a nod, her lips pressed into a thin line. Just like anticipated, she sidesteps the debris and out into the open. Her expression visibly drops, before she’s lowering her gun and gesturing at the others with a tilt of her head.

Tony follows her out into the icy canyon of nothing and holds his breath. She points towards a frozen lake with a long index finger.

A figure that is clearly Bucky, judging by the windswept hair and the tense line of rigid shoulder muscles, is standing by the lake’s edge. Hostile slashes of bitter wind tear through the mountain floor- Bucky doesn’t move an inch.

From this angle, Tony can’t tell which individual they’re dealing with. The man stands perfectly still, a statue in a world of liquid dreams.

“Sergeant Barnes?” Nat raises her voice over the Romanian winds but doesn’t shout. Not one nerve of the figure flickers and Tony shoots a concerned look at his team. 

“Do we know any of the trigger words that HYDRA used on him?” Bruce whispers but sighs when Tony shakes his head.

Clint was right. This would be miles easier if Steve had been here. But, he wasn’t. Tony had managed to survive the last three years without him. He could survive the next three minutes. 

His feet seem to exclude themselves from his body, and suddenly he’s walking towards the lake with absolutely no plan. Nat hisses something at him but he ignores her, and slowly tiptoes through the snow to reach Barnes. As he gets closer, Tony can see horror marks of abuse littering Bucky’s bare arms. There’s an angry burn down his bicep that is already blistering, and what could be hundreds of cuts marring his neck. Some are healing as Tony moves closer but the dried blood sticking tackily to the fair skin causes his stomach to clench.

Tony stops dead about five meters from his back.

“Sergeant Barnes?” His voice sounds low against the harsh conditions but he revels in the clear slash of authority that entwines the vowels. “Can you hear me?”

His form starts to tremble, and his head lowers in a stance of fear. Something tugs at Tony’s chest, but he can’t work out whether its apprehension or the fucking connection to Steve that’s ruining his bastard life.

“Bucky?” He tries again, and holds his ground when the figure arches his back to glare straight at Tony.

It was definitely Bucky’s exterior. Whether it was actually Bucky Barnes- the war hero, Captain America’s sidekick- or an indoctrinated human weapon inside the casing was still to be answered.

“I won’t ask you again.” Tony keeps his tone similar to the last demand, and raises his head defiantly as the faceplate slips over his nose. “Are you Bucky?”

To his shock, his gets a small and nervous nod. It’s light, but it’s there.

“Yeah,” Bucky suddenly croaks. He wraps his arms around himself pathetically and instantly he goes from symbol of death to trauma sponge. “James Buchanan Barnes, born March 10th 1917. Best friends with Steve Rogers and presently residing n’Wakanda under the protection of the King.”

Tony nods and extends his arm behind his torso to make a ‘come hither’ motion to the rest of the team. Nat reaches him first and looks Bucky up and down with a critical eye.

“Bucky.” He promises her, the closed-off façade in her eyes melting away. Bruce is already prodding Bucky and asking him questions which gets him minimal answers in return.

“What happened to his body?” Sam enquires under his breath, folding away his wings for a moment. 

“I don’t know.” Tony replies vaguely. “But I’m guessing he didn’t end up here out of choice.”

They all turn to stare at Bucky as Bruce resignedly wraps him up in one of his jackets. A combined thought of discomfort passes through them like a virus.

_What the fuck is happening?_

“We better get him back to the compound.” Clint mutters as Thor helps to guide Bucky through the ice. “Whatever’s gone on, I bet a lot of people are gonna have a lot of questions.”

 _Fuck_ , Tony mentally berates, and brings up the rear of the group as they all march back to the Quinjet, _I didn’t sign up for this shit_.

When Steve had disappeared, Tony swore that the Avengers was going to downsize to local critical missions only. No more global terror rings, no more UN debriefings that ate his soul alive, and no more signs of Steve on every protocol they had to go through. No trace of Steve: that had been his demand to Pepper.

Therefore, it was just his luck to be freezing his balls off in the middle of nowhere rescuing a volatile murderer who also happened to be his ex-boyfriend’s best friend; a man he hadn’t properly spoken to since the Accords.

Tony shakes his head to himself and jumps from the ground to drift into the sky above the others in a last desperate plea to his mind to stop screaming. He was so damn screwed.

-

When Tony knocks on the bedroom door a few hours later, he doesn’t get a reply. He asks Friday to inform Bucky that he was entering before pushing the door open with his foot, just in case something had gone drastically wrong and he needed his fists to defend himself. Training with Nat to get over Steve had equipped him with some pretty dangerous headlocks, and now he considered himself to be almost as deadly out of the suit than in it.

Luckily, the only evident threat in the room was that the ajar window was letting in icy cold air from outside. Bucky was sat on the bed in a flimsy borrowed t-shirt, freshly showered and staring at absolutely nothing. 

“You’re lucky that serum is keeping you warm.” Tony attempts, but doesn’t move any further towards him to let Bucky know that he was in charge of how close they got. “It’s fucking freezing in here.”

Bucky’s metal dull pupils flick up to meet Tony’s for a millisecond before dropping to his hands. The sweep of recognition that passed across the man’s face didn’t escape Tony’s hyper-aware attention which makes him smile slightly. At least he wasn’t starting from nothing. 

“Where’s Steve?”

Tony’s heart stutters in its steady rhythm as he bites the plump flesh of his lower lip tightly to ground himself. 

“Uh, Ireland. I don’t know where… he lives there now.”

Bucky’s eyebrows furrow together in confusion and he draws his head up to stare at the other man; his entire expression still carefully guarded. “What the fuck?”

It’s at that moment, that the cold sickness of realisation constricts in Tony’s stomach. _Oh fuck, please don’t say-_

“What’s the last thing you remember?” He asks carefully, and when Bucky doesn’t answer, he moves closer towards the hunched form with a pounding heart.

Bucky opens his mouth, but words fail him. Lost and isolated in an unfamiliar setting, he opens and closes his mouth relentlessly until anger overtakes his fear. He slams a fist down onto his knee with a resounding smack that makes Tony flinch.

“I remember being in Wakanda and-” a loud breathy gasp escapes his mouth. This was a far more emotional Bucky Barnes than Tony was used to seeing. Everyone was used to the Bucky who sent blank, robotic glares at anyone who came too close. They were used to the weapon. “You and Steve were together and… _happy_ and you were running this supernatural circus like a support group. I just…” He trails off to run a hand through his hair with a sigh. Tony takes his chance and gently lowers his torso to the bed to sit a good distance away from the chaos.

“I don’t know why you can’t remember the last three years.” He mutters, and steels himself when Bucky whimpers into his fingers. “But I promise we’ll do everything in our power to find out.”

“HYDRA?”

“We don’t know,” Tony shakes his head slowly, being cautious to not take his eyes off Bucky’s wired frame. “Probably?”

A low moan, sort of animalistic, echoes around the space. 

“And Steve’s gone?”

“Yeah,” Tony shrugs and shoves his hands in his pockets to clench at the material covering his leg. “He left about three years ago.”

Suddenly, all the emotion seems to rush back into Bucky’s face. Fraught panic, disbelief and heartache flood into his shattered eyes in waterfalls of pain until he squeezes them tightly shut with a ragged breath. “Wait, I- you guys broke up?”

Tony attempts to swallow past the pulsing ball of loss wedged in his throat. He fails, so replies very hoarsely: “Yeah. Steve left us.”

“Tony,” Bucky whimpers then, and finally, _finally_ , turns his head to properly look at his best-friend’s ex. “What happened to me?”

It hurts, to see the pain Tony had felt for the last three years reflected in someone else. What can he say? You were in Wakanda, and then suddenly you weren’t? There’s a high possibility that you were kidnapped by wannabe-HYDRA, brainwashed again and killed a fuck-ton of people?

“We don’t know.” He answers honestly, and fucking hates how visibly Bucky is trembling. His hands flex and unflex rapidly between his legs, his breathing quickening with every exhale.

“No offense, but I really fuckin’ wish Steve was here right now.”

The truth shouldn’t surprise him, but it still feels like a physical punch to the gut. Even Bucky, the guy who hated Tony’s guts for a good few years, the guy who has a demon alter-ego lurking under the captivating eyes and chiselled jaw, doesn’t want him.

Fucking Steve. The selfish, inconsiderate fucker.

“Me too.” Tony whispers and lifts his thighs up to shimmer one millimetre closer to Bucky’s hunched form. Both men sit there, watching as the sunlight trickled through the glass in beams of golden liquid, and try desperately to mask how their souls were cracking more with every thought. “Me too.”


	2. Captain America Who?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Somehow, Tony finds himself tasked with protecting the most sought-after criminal on the planet.
> 
> Where the hell was that dickhead Steve when you needed him?

“Tony, I’ve already told you.” Nick Fury repeats with a full-body sigh that makes the table he’s leaning his elbows on vibrate. “We _don’t know_ how he managed to get to Romania.”

Tony paces around the spacious office and blows air between his teeth angrily. Bucky keeps his head lowered with his wide eyes flicking between Tony’s anxious shoes and Fury’s taut expression.

“Bullshit.” Tony snaps; his manner a perfect example of pissed-off and stupidly exhausted. “There’s absolutely no way you sent us in there without knowing _something_.”

The office was positively smoking with tension. Bucky was sat in the corner of the room with Fury and Tony at opposite ends of a very long conference table. Even though it was the middle of the day, the curtains were drawn shut to give the impression of privacy. It was slightly ironic, really, that SHIELD was attempting to protect the highest-profile fugitive in the world.

“We are as in the dark as you.” Fury demands, his persona bristling at the billionaire’s accusations. “As much as I hate to say it, you went in blind. The organisation was given the same intel that was passed on to you, I don’t know anything more than you or your team.”

Tony crosses his arms with a growl. “Brilliant, then he’s the government’s issue. Problem solved.”

“Tony-” Bucky tries, but the other man blatantly ignores him.

“He’s the lost clause in the Accords,” Fury barrels on, his eyebrows getting lower and closer together with every passing second. “The government doesn’t want to take responsibility, nor does the UN.”

“What, SHIELD wants him?”

“Fuck no,” he snaps. Bucky feels very, very small. “That would be a disaster for everyone involved. No, you’re going to deal with this.”

“Excuse me?” Tony spits; his eyes dance alight with flames that Fury doesn’t even bother to put out. If anything, he pours petrol on the inferno by sighing patronizingly. “Are you fucking with me?”

“You have a more detailed history with Barnes than we do.” The director shrugs and leans back in his chair. “I think you’re more than equipped to handle the situation.”

“So what do we…” There’s a tense pause as Tony trails off, Fury quirking one eyebrow upwards in exasperation. “I- fuck, what- what am I supposed to do with him?” Bucky shoots him a hurt frown at the detachment but Tony pretends not to notice. “I can’t send him back to Wakanda, because that’s where these bastards took him from- tell T’Challa his protection defence is _shit_ by the way- and you don’t want him so what the fuck do I do?” 

Fury watches solemnly as Tony tries to catch his breath, beads of sweat appearing around his temples from where his heart is going into overdrive. 

“The safest plan of action- and don’t bite my head off here- would be to keep Barnes here at the compound-”

“ _What_?” Tony splutters and flaps his hand around in Bucky’s face in anguish. Bucky cowers back in his seat and tries to avoid the appendages being flicked about dangerously near his eyes. “Are you insane?”

“For the greater good, it would be the safest option.” Fury counteracts with a pointed sigh but Tony snorts and turns away to pace around the room again.

“Right, and what happens when these maniacs come back to finish off the job they supposedly failed?”

Bucky’s lungs seize up into pathetic balls of suffocation. Fuck. They were coming back to get him.

Fury’s eyes darken. “You put their motherfuckin’ asses in some shallow graves. You’re the Avengers, Iron Man. Do your damn job.”

His voice drops a few octaves into a gravelly warning that freezes Tony on the spot. He goes to argue with the SHIELD agent, before realising that this was where Steve would normally come in. Steve… god knows what he would’ve said about this shitstorm.

A low bubble of rage erupts from Tony’s mouth before he’s forcing his palms into his eye sockets. 

“Fury you irresponsible son of a bitch,” he murmurs and just gets a threatening raised eyebrow in response. “Fine. You know what, fine. When Barnes goes _loco_ and kills all of us, you can have him. Plus, supernatural blood on your hands.”

“Stop being so dramatic,” Fury scoffs and rolls his eyes at Tony’s pacing. Bucky watches the confrontation, feeling more misplaced and less wanted than he had ever experienced before. “Lock him in the basement if you have to; don’t let this new terror cell get hold of him.”

“Fuck that.” Tony finally takes a seat and wipes a hand across his forehead; it was like the situation was actually melting his brain. “We need to come up with a disguise plan. Walmart-HYDRA are gonna know that Bucky’s at the compound and not back in Wakanda. We need to make them think that he’s impossible to touch- something high profile.”

Bucky clears his throat from his corner; two pairs of concerned eyes fall on him in an instant. “I’m not gonna like this.”

“You’re not gonna like being dead much better.” Tony fires back before his spine arches ram-rod straight as he suddenly snaps his fingers, a manic glint evident in his dull eyes. “Fuck it- I’ve got a plan.”

-

"So let me get this straight," Nat flaps her hands around in irritation and Tony sighs heavily. "To get over Steve, your ex-boyfriend who is marrying somebody else and living his best life in Ireland, you are planning to turn his broken best-friend into the Captain America you wish Steve would've been?"

"No." Tony retorts, slightly horrified. "Absolutely not."

"Yes-" Sam interrupts with a more serious tone than was strictly necessary. "That is exactly what's happening here."

The team was gathered in the compound’s biggest kitchen on the communal floor. Most of them were sat at the huge oak table apart from Bucky who was perched on a counter knocking his heels against the marble cupboards and Thor, who was leaning against the doorframe whilst watching Bucky’s every movement with a critical frown.

“If we’ve been tasked with babysitting Bucky until this whole thing blows over, then we are gonna do it properly.” Tony sighs, only to be interrupted by Bucky who demands attention with a pointed cough.

“And hey, less of the ‘broken’.”

Nat opens her mouth to argue poison before Tony holds a hand up between them to keep the peace.

“He needs to be protected in broad daylight. Whoever deposited Bucky in Romania with no recollection of the last three years is probably going to be looking for him. There are _zero_ reports of any Winter Soldier behaviour in the last couple of years which perhaps suggests that the masterminds behind the operation failed to achieve whatever it was they wanted to do. Fury, and the UN, want him to stay here where we can keep an eye on him. We can’t hide him, because then they’re going to come looking. So-”

Sam chimes in with a snort and throws his head back in amusement: “So your genius plan is to dress the poor guy up as Captain America so these fools get scared and don’t come back?”

A grunt of annoyance whirs from Tony’s throat. It’s a sound that has Sam’s back arching to escape from the man’s darkening eyes.

“I suggest, Falcon, that if you don’t have anything valuable to add, you can _fuck off_.”

Sam mutters something under his breath but doesn’t make any attempts to move. Nat rolls her eyes and shrugs nonchalantly. “He’s got a point.”

Tony ignores her and carries on, smacking his palm down on the table with a loud thud.

“Someone as _high profile_ as the Captain America persona is gonna be noticed if they go missing. We reinvent Bucky as Cap, try to brush all of his previous destruction and murder charges under the carpet for the time being, and sub-tweet those twats that he’s not to be messed with.”

Bruce grunts and leans back in his chair, impressed. Sam still doesn’t look convinced but masks his expression to be carefully blank.

“If you believe that this will work,” Thor accepts and wanders over to the table to squeeze Tony’s shoulder. “I trust you. The Winter Soldier?” He narrows his eyes at Bucky’s hunched posture. “Not so much. But I will learn to, if it stops this planet I now call home from heading straight into conflict.”

“Thanks buddy,” Tony pats his hand gratefully. “Appreciated.”

Clint pipes up from his seat by clearing his throat. “I’m still concerned that some of this is still to do with Steve. It seems a bit like a ‘sticking two fingers up at your ex’ excuse.”

“I can only remember a time when Tony and Steve were happily together,” Bucky assures him. “He’s also supposedly my oldest friend. I don’t want to hurt him, nor do I want to hurt hundreds more people by being brainwashed again.”

The kitchen falls silent at the severity constructing Bucky’s tone. Clint purses his lips but thankfully doesn’t push further into mentioning Steve.

“He didn’t even cross my mind.” Tony says breezily, even though it was a damn _lie_. “I’m doing Bucky, and the world, a favour.”

“Do you really think that they could come back for him?” Nat asks nervously and Bucky visibly stiffens.

“Maybe,” Tony answers honestly, his eyes meeting Bucky’s pained ones with a frown. “But we can only hope that this plan works and they truly fuck off.”

“Are you going to inform Steve about this?” Bruce nudges Tony quietly but before he can reply, Bucky coughs from the counter.

“I think it’s best to inform Steve about this.” He says softly, and Tony wants to groan in pain. “Before I get into that spandex attention magnet, you should tell him that there’s a genuine reason for me to be wearing it.”

“He doesn’t have any reason to care.” Tony mumbles miserably. Nat sighs and shakes her head with a disappointed but knowing huff.

“As I much as I hate to say it, you know that’s not true.”

“God,” Tony whinges and stands up from his chair to grab his phone. The metal legs screech painfully against the tiled floor and the enhanced members of the team hiss bitingly. “I hate you all.”

He disappears to his office and flicks up Steve’s number from speed dial. He’d spent months convincing himself that it was still in his phone for emergencies, even after that excruciating period of radio silence. Now, he didn’t know what to tell himself.

It rings three times before the call connects.

“You found him.” Steve murmurs down the line, and why (oh god, why) did Tony agree to this?

He groans loudly and leans into the hand that’s massaging his temples with a wince. 

“Steve-”

“How did you… I mean- he didn’t remember anything? Not one thing about the last three years? What, one tip-off and there he was? No Winter Soldier, no insanity, just Bucky?”

Steve sounds haggard. He sounds exhausted and lost, and Tony selfishly revels in the fact that the man was clearly feeling some of the pain he’d left Tony with the day he’d walked out of the door without looking back. 

“He wanted you.” Tony says very quietly, not caring that Steve sounded like he was on the verge of tears. “I had to explain that you’d left and that you weren’t Captain America anymore. Do you know how that felt? Reliving the heartache you caused when you dropped everything? I had to explain to someone as fragile as Barnes that the only constant he recognised and remembered didn’t give enough of a fuck to be there.”

“No I-” Steve chokes out, his voice cracking on every vowel. He takes a deep breath and when he comes back over the phone, he sounds pissed. “You know damn well that I would’ve been there in a heartbeat if you’d told me you had him straight away.”

Tony laughs then, a raucous and surprising howl that clutches all the breath from his lungs. “Don’t fucking kid yourself. You wouldn’t have fucking dared to come over here. Not because the team would’ve slaughtered you, but because you would’ve had to leave Bucky at some point to run back to Ireland and to Alannah. You wouldn’t have been able to deal with the impossibility of leaving someone as broken as your best-friend behind, so you wouldn’t have bothered.”

Silence. Tony panics for a fleeting moment that this time he might’ve actually driven his ex-boyfriend away for good. Then Steve makes a low breathless whine that crackles through his ear canal. 

“That’s not fair.”

“Yes it is, Steve.” Tony snaps, his skin starting to flush with anger. “How did you even know about Barnes?”

“Nick sent a message to me.” Steve sounds… almost smug that he was still a part of SHIELD and Avenger communication. “He thought I should know. Y’know, because Bucky’s my best friend an’ all?”

Tony wants to reach over to the other side of the world and smack the smirk right off the bastard’s perfect face.

“He knew that you were in Ireland all that time, didn’t he?”

Steve doesn’t answer. There’s a clenching sensation around his lungs that’s so tight, Tony feels like he might actually burst.

“Probably.”

Time seems to stand still as Tony exhales slowly. _In for five, out for seven. Repeat._

“Well you can fuck off, Steve. We’re protecting your best friend by re-cycling the old Cap uniform. I hope you enjoy seeing somebody you spent your whole life trying to impress parade around doing your job.”

“What the fuck?” Steve spits. “That’s a stupid fuckin’ thing to do.”

Tony snorts. The jealous grate to Steve’s dialect was hardening with every word. “Why? Because you’re not gonna be able to bear him doing a better job than you?”

“No, because-”

“You have absolutely no right to dictate what the Avengers do. You lost that damn right three years ago.”

He hears a soft _snick_ that has his neck snapping upwards in alarm. It’s only Bucky, an apologetic frown wedged between his eyebrows, sidling into the room. Tony points wordlessly at his phone with an irritated gesture that has Bucky nodding in acknowledgment. 

“I need to talk to him.” Steve suddenly demands then as the background noise from his end of the line quietens considerably. It sounded like he’d stepped outside, because out of nowhere Tony can hear birds chirping and a gentle breeze caressing the speaker. “Bucky, I mean. I’m gonna come to New York so I can see him-”

“No you’re fucking not,” Tony cackles harshly. “You’re not stepping a toe into my compound.” Bucky gives him a questioning frown as a wild notion swirls in Tony’s mind. “We’ll come and see you. That way, we can leave if you act like an asshole without having to kick you out.”

“But-”

“We come to you, or you don’t see him at all.” Tony stresses, a steady smile forming on his lips from gaining the upper-hand for once. “I swear.”

Steve goes to yell at him again before falling silent. Then an almighty frustrated roar shoots into Tony’s ear; he holds the phone away from his ringing head with a disgusted wince.

“Fine, but only you and him. I can’t deal with the rest of the team yet. I need more time.”

 _You’ve had three fucking years_ , Tony screams to himself, _how much more time could you possibly need?_

“You really are a selfish son of a bitch.” He murmurs. “We’ll be there tomorrow. Send a car.”

He takes great relish in hanging up before Steve can dispute him. Bucky raises his eyebrows impatiently from his angsty position against the door.

“Well?”

Tony gives him a remorseful grimace, which earns him a slightly panicked squeak in response. “How do you fancy a mercifully short vacation to Ireland?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a side note, this is NOT beta read. Everything you see here is from me, which means that any unfortunate mistakes that have slipped my focus are all mine. Apologies!
> 
> Also, I'm sad to say that I've recently had some very bad news. It might affect my upload schedule, I don't know, so please bear with me as I navigate present life. If updates seem a little slow, I'll try my best to jump back on it.
> 
> Hope you enjoyed! More soon :)


	3. The Face of the Old Life

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ireland, rain and angst. What more could you ask for on this cold Monday?

Bucky blinks, and suddenly he and Tony are sat on a private jet on the way to Ireland. Tony’s curled up in a seat with his knees pressed uncomfortably into the window pane and frowning at his phone.

“This is gonna be hard for you, isn’t it?”

The other man looks up with a blank stare, his eyes blinking in misunderstanding like car wipers. There’s a tightness clouding them that Bucky hasn’t yet seen and it scares him.

“Yeah,” Tony sighs after an elongated pause as he continues to rapidly compose a message to Pepper to explain why he wasn’t going to be turning up to his meetings. “It’s gonna be fucking horrific.”

“I don’t-” Bucky murmurs and twists his body further round in his seat. “He just left, and you only heard from him again five months ago?”

Tony closes his eyes for a brief moment as he mentally accepts that he needed to get the conversation over with. He knew that his biased opinion of the break up was the only interpretation that the man was going to get, and he started to feel bad that he was poisoning a memory-loss victim against his best friend. Blurry snippets of Steve’s hands around his throat with a black eye slash into his vision. He suppresses the urge to shake his head vigorously and shatter the fragments.

“That night, we had a fight. Yeah, we’d fought before, but that night it was awful. It was like we were both under indoctrination and I…”

He loses all concentration and trails off. Bucky doesn’t push him- instead he kicks off his shoes and hugs his knees to his chest to listen intently.

“I hated him. I actually hated his guts, which was weird as hell because up until that point I loved him so fiercely it ached.”

“Maybe it was just a one-off?” Bucky pipes up hopefully, his expression slumping when Tony scoffs.

“I was so in my head it was ridiculous; it was like all I could feel was disgust. We could’ve killed each other that night and I wouldn’t have felt anything until hours later. I- _fuck_ \- you have no idea how awful it was.” Tony recounts with a breathy exhale. 

Bucky purses his lips but doesn’t try and challenge him again. He didn’t remember anything about the last three years, so how was he going to give advice to a man he only remembered from Soldier-hazy dreams? There was no denying that Bucky hated feeling lost. He desperately yearned for those lost years. Everything would make so much more sense if he could just _remember_.

“You said there was radio silence for nearly three years?” Bucky carefully poses.

“Nothing,” Tony confirms, his fingers tapping a rhythm reeking of apprehension on his knee. “He blocked my calls until very recently, managed to bypass surveillance, everything. I don’t know how he did it- in fact, I thought it was gonna be impossible to lose him-”

“But you did.”

Tony bites his lip and turns to stare out of the window again. Bucky realises with a lurch that Tony was pulling away again, but he needed answers.

“I did.”

An uncomfortable silence settles on the cabin: Tony chewing through his tongue and Bucky scrambling hopelessly for something to say to break the awkwardness. 

“Did Steve tell me where he was when you broke up?”

Tony seems taken aback by the question and actually puts his phone down thoughtfully. Cogs whir behind his eyes as he attempts to pinpoint details he’d worked for three years to burn.

“Uh, probably? If I remember correctly, Sam contacted T’Challa to ask you, but His Royal Highness was so far up his own ass he ignored the message and told me to go fuck myself.”

Bucky snorts. Huh, that sounded like the T’Challa he faintly knew. A T’Challa who would protect him, though, was a very alien notion.

“Sir?” The pilot pokes his head into the cabin and Tony nearly jumps out of his skin. “It was Cork airport that we are supposed to be landing in, isn’t it?”

“Yeah?” Tony answers, confused. “Why?”

He gets a disinterested shrug from the man responsible for his life 38,000 feet in the air. “I only know Dublin.”

Bucky widens his eyes towards Tony with a small squeak. The engineer rolls his eyes before turning back to his staff member with a disappointed glare.

“Steve Rogers apparently lives in-” he checks the one worded texts Steve had sent him the night before after that emotional phone call with a frown. “Somewhere called Kinsale? You need to fly us into Cork, and I’ve sorted a driver for when we land.”

“Very good, sir.” Is the flippant reply, and Tony makes a mental note to find better staff.

Bucky watches with a sinking feeling as Tony plugs in his headphones, closes his eyes, and blocks out the world entirely. With nothing to do except read some trashy economics magazines Pepper had clearly left strewn around, Bucky joins the older man in drifting off to find solace in sleep.

It lasts a few hours before he’s being dragged through water into the starting tendrils of a panic attack. His chest clenches painfully around pockets of nothing as his body fights out at some imaginary being. From the depths of what memory he has left, Bucky knows that anxiety was something that had plagued him before. Like a bullet, he immediately connotates the awful feelings with having blood on his hands. He dry heaves into his palms, just as Tony’s blinking back to reality with a concerned frown.

“You good?”

He can only nod; all the breath squeezed out of his lungs by invisible hands crammed down his throat. The artificial plane lighting claws at his retinas as he slides his eyes closed for a relieved gasp. Tony watches on, powerless and tortured himself.

“Yeah. Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Tony says, his eyes deceiving him by flickering with alarm. “It’s cool. They happen to nearly everyone. Especially people like us.”

Bucky fights the urge to roll his eyes. “Losers.”

Tony shakes his head. “Victims.”

Well- what was Bucky supposed to say to that? His vocal chords strain silently to make a noise but his mouth fails to connect and no words appear. If only he could make some noise of agreement-

“Sir?” The irritating drone of the pilot echoes over the tannoy. “If you and your… uh, _guest_ , could prepare for landing as we expect to be over the runway in about three minutes.”

Bucky screams to himself in his head at the missed opportunity to find some common ground with this complicated man. Aforementioned complicated man fastens his seatbelt and peers out of the tiny window like an excitable child as the plane swoops down below the clouds to momentarily glimpse Irish skylines. Bucky grits his teeth as they land, still not fully comfortable with the foreign feeling of flying whilst in his own mind.

They manage to exit the jet quickly, and as they both wander down the steps a sleek black Audi is waiting for them with tinted windows. Bucky laughs under his breath and Tony shoots him a knowing smirk. Impressive.

Tony, ever the businessman, nods politely at the driver holding the door open for them as they slide inside. It’s horrifically luxurious in the car, so Bucky purposely pushes his hands between his knees to stop his fingers from touching anything. The other man stretches out in his seat like a cat and sighs at Bucky as the car starts to pull away.

“This is the only part of this visit that I’m gonna enjoy.” He announces pointedly. Bucky shrugs in response and leans further into the car door to survey the landscape. It’s raining- huge teardrops of precipitation pulsing down the glass- but it’s soothing.

About thirty minutes later, the scenery changes and familiar pockets of housing dots around the roads. Bucky marvels at how quiet it was, on account of the rain, and sneaks a look at Tony who just radiates boredom. It’s not until the car pulls up on the road outside a house protected by an iron gate that Tony stiffens and drags his body into an upright sitting position. The house looms above them in harsh lines of bricks; a Victorian mirage of Steve’s shit promises.

Tony blows air through his teeth, the sound slicing down Bucky’s spine in pinpricks of fire. A grey sheen blossoms in Tony’s cheeks and Bucky swallows nervously.

“Wait for us here.” Tony says softly and it takes Bucky a moment to realise that the driver was being addressed and not him. Without waiting for a reply, Tony eases himself out of the car to gaze up at the house with a swarm of fuck-off huge butterflies thumping in his stomach. Bucky joins him on the pavement, his mouth set into a grim line. Was he excited to see Steve? He was looking forward to seeing somebody he really recognised, but the haunting glare in Tony’s eyes on the plane made him feel uneasy now.

The gates swing open out of nowhere with a resounding grate that has Tony stepping backwards in defence. There isn’t anybody waiting at the other side, nor looking out of the windows to notice them. It’s eerie and threatening and _so_ , Tony thinks, _so Steve_. 

“Come on.” Bucky nudges him with his elbow and hopes to god he sounds close to authoritative. Tony follows him silently up the gravel driveway until they reach the huge oak front door. “Hardly inconspicuous.” Bucky snorts, and knocks loudly. “How did he manage to stay under the radar for three years here?”

Tony doesn’t hear him. His eyes stay firmly trained on the door; Nat’s words on the important of total focus swimming around in his mind. He should give Steve a Vulcan death grip as a deterrence: you’re not ruining my life this time.

The door swings open to reveal Steve. Shock hangs heavy in Tony’s throat, even though it’s been five months- not three years- since he last came face to face with his old life. It’s disconcerting, but he weirdly feels stronger this time than at the market.

Steve bypasses him completely. He steps out of the door and practically throws himself at Bucky. His long arms cage the smaller man in a death grip, his hands entwining at the base of Bucky’s spine as he buries his face in brunette hair. Bucky can only embrace him back just as hard and presses his face into the junction between Steve’s slender neck and muscly shoulders. Tony stands and watches, feeling very cold.

It takes about a minute before Steve’s pulling back to exhale deeply and run a hand over his face. 

“Hey,” he whispers and squeezes Bucky’s shoulder. “Do you remember me?”

Bucky gives him a watery smile that screams relief. “O’course. How could I forget you? Dork.”

The two men just stare at each other as hundreds of emotions fly across Bucky’s face. Exhaustion, delight, disappointment…- Tony watches as they all flash across his eyes.

Steve turns to Tony then, goes to reach out for him politely but thinks better of it, and just settles for a sharp nod. A part of Tony that seems embarrassingly huge wants his ex-boyfriend to wrap him up the same way he did with Bucky. Then he steels himself and remembers Bucky, plus the indescribable pain he’d been left with, and lifts his chin in defiance.

“Steve.”

“Hey, Tony.”

Bucky fidgets nervously before he’s kicking the back of Steve’s ankle with his toes. “Can we come in?”

“Huh? Oh- yeah, uh of course. It’s uh, good to see you Buck.”

The trio step back through the door into a grand hallway with doors extending off at all sides. A massive chandelier dangles by the arching stairway and Tony genuinely feels like he’s stepped through the looking glass. The Steve he knew would’ve been happy with a one room apartment with everything crammed in like it had been in the army. This house had diamond encrusted door handles. What the fuck?

“I know it’s quite… out there,” Steve says, reading Tony’s inner thoughts with a pointed look. “But Alannah decorated and she loves it, so…” Bucky’s eyes narrow in confusion so Steve has to explain: “My fiancé.”

Tony feels sick.

They find themselves going through the nearest door into an open-plan kitchen with sparkling white marble counter tops and a lengthy metal table. 

“Drink?”

Bucky opens his mouth to reply but Tony beats him to it. “We won’t be staying long.”

Steve puts the glass back down a with sigh and turns around to lean his thighs against a cupboard. Tony crosses his arms in defence before clearing his throat.

“Why did you want to see Bucky?”

“He was kidnapped, beaten, _brainwashed_ and left for dead in Romania,” Steve replies with an underlying growl. “I apologise for wanting to check up on him.”

“Did you tell me you were here when you left Tony?” Bucky interrupts, the need for an answer literally burning his lungs. “What about when you got engaged? Did you tell me any of it?”

A horrible guilty grimace snarls at Steve’s lips. He drops his head and refuses to look Bucky in the eyes.

“No. Nobody knew I’d come here. As I said, I expect Nick had some sort of idea but we’d only be in touch recently, when you were found.”

Bucky’s posture slumps into a wilted cower. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“If someone had come looking for me, I didn’t want to put you in a position where you’d have to betray me to save yourself or someone else.” Steve reasons softly. He eyes slide to lock onto Tony’s as his expression hardens. “You too.”

And that… that’s unexpected. Tony sighs but doesn’t uncross his arms. He lost Steve all those years ago and he wasn’t here to get him back. He wasn’t goddamnit; this was about Bucky.

Bucky clearly has more questions but Tony intervenes before he becomes too distracted. They have a job to do.

“Now that Bucky is under Avenger protection,” Tony knows he’s in his business tone and so does Steve judging by how quickly his eyes darken in irritation. “We have decided to highly publicise Bucky in a new light by reinventing him as the new Captain America. I am not asking for your permission, nor your blessing, I am here to _tell_ you this is happening.”

Steve clenches his jaw and snorts. “Good luck with that burden.” He shoots at Bucky, who just frowns in confused retaliation.

“It’s a good idea,” Bucky counteracts with tense muscles at the mocking beam in Steve’s eyes. “Whoever took me will probably come back but doing this is hopefully gonna warn them off.”

“What are you going to do when these assholes come back, two hundred propaganda-machine fighters strong, and burn the compound to the ground?” The blonde man throws at Tony.

He shrugs.

“Guess we’ll have to kill every single one.”

Steve scoffs incredulously and moves slightly towards Tony. “You’re delusional. This is… this is _suicide_ Tony, I just- Buck, mate, this is insane.”

Bucky shakes his head vehemently. “There’s no other way.”

“Yeah there is.” Steve challenges with fiery enthusiasm. “Back to Wakanda?”

“What, where he was snatched from originally?” Tony rolls his eyes. “Yeah, good work Steve.”

Tension thrums through the kitchen as the dull outdoor light illuminates the tiles in shadows.

“I’m sorry, I just-” Steve trails off and holds his hands in the air. “I can’t condone this stupidity.”

Bucky hates the alien urge to punch his best friend. When did Steve become such a _dickhead?_

“I don’t give a shit. I told you, I’m not asking for your permission.” Tony tells him.

“Why are you here then?” Steve suddenly snaps and all the breath whooshes out of Bucky’s lungs at once.

“Steve-”

He’s ignored.

“You wanted to see Bucky and I got the impression he wanted to see you.” Tony nearly shouts and finally uncrosses his arms to wave them in exaggeration next to his own shoulders in mock apology. “Sorry that I’ve got that so wrong!”

“Cap is a fucking death wish, you’d be mad to even put the guy near it-”

“Oh fuck off.” Tony laughs harshly. “I’d put everything I own on you wishing everyday you could be Cap again. You’re addicted to danger.”

Steve laughs back; his chuckle sounding even darker than Tony’s. “You wish. I enjoy waking up every morning now that I’m waking up next to Alannah.”

This freezes Tony to the core. Icy, so cold it burns, icy slashes work their way in fast succession down his limbs before his muscles jar.

“So that’s why you left.” Tony mutters, his words hardly finding any ground. Bucky has to strain to hear him, but it seems that Steve’s receiving everything loud and clear. “It was because of me.”

“I left, because I wanted normality.” Steve snaps. Their voices were rising louder by the second, thumping throughout the house like sirens. A dog was barking outside but the raw grating edge of the noise was drowned out by the ascending pitch from the man. “I wanted a life where nobody was expecting me to be perfect. I wanted to love someone and be assured that they weren’t going to fling themselves into an alien portal!”

“I’m sorry that my job is to save the world.” Tony seethes and Bucky cowers further into himself as a muscle memory reaction. “You threw away our relationship, you threw away me, because you couldn’t handle the chaos that came from being in the Avengers. Well fuck you Steve, you egotistical, selfish, close-minded piece of shit! Captain America is Steve Rogers, asshole. You can’t escape from one without killing the other.”

Steve just blinks at him, his fists trembling with how hard he’s gripping his palms. Bucky can see a literal red mist curling around the two men and trapping them from walking away. 

“Do you know how it feels, for everyone to expect a particular thing from you every damn day?”

“YES!” Tony explodes back and throws his hands to his face in utter fury. “I’m goddamn Iron Man! I’m Howard Stark’s fucking protégé- except, oh no sorry, that’s another thing you took from me!”

“You goddamn moron,” Steve yells- his eyes seem to bulge from his head like a balloon. Tony was fairly sure that the man was going to burst. “You think I wanted any part of your _shitty_ life? I left because you were suffocating me every fucking day! Every minute you were second guessing our relationship and how it was gonna come across to other people. That’s all you cared about. Not me.”

It takes a heartbeat for Tony’s face to fall. He looks like he’s been slapped; an angry flush floods through his cheeks as a worrying sheen glazes his eyes. 

“You’re not the only one who was scrutinized for every miniscule thing.” He mutters and Steve drops his head with a breathy exhale. “All of the panic I wasted on you, on us, was to conserve our relationship and the good parts of it. I didn’t want anyone to be involved with the love I had for you.”

Bucky has to look away at the sheer emotion drawing life from Tony’s skin. All of a sudden, he looks like heartbreak personified. He looks exhausted and used and… fuck.

A ball of pulsing hatred for his blonde so-called best friend crackles through his veins.

“The Steve I used to know, the Steve I called my brother,” Bucky hisses out of nowhere as two pairs of eyes glance at him in shock. “Would never abandon someone he loved. He would fight for them.”

Steve bites his lip hard enough to draw blood. He doesn’t argue with Bucky, and that causes the internal ball of hatred to explode into a molten mass of loathing. 

“He’s saving my life, asshole. That’s something _you_ should be doing.” Bucky continues with a shake of his head. He grabs Tony by the upper arm to steer him towards the front door. “He’s protecting me, Steve, by taking something people respect- not fear- to deter a new HYDRA from manipulating my weaknesses into taking lives. Captain America isn’t a fuckin’ burden, it’s a gift.” Then, before he can slam the door shut behind him, he turns to pin Steve with one last final look of disgust. “Enjoy your boring, mundane life, Rogers. He’s worth triple of you.”

With one last glimpse at Steve’s dumbfounded expression, Bucky kicks the front door shut. 

Tony all but throws himself into the car, their driver nearly dropping his takeaway cup of tea in shock. Bucky shakes his head to himself before jumping in after him as the vehicle tears down the road, leaving Steve and his destruction in the distance.

“I’m sorry.” Bucky mutters after ten tense minutes of silence. Tony grits his jaw but doesn’t answer. “He had no right to talk to you like that. I still don’t know exactly what happened between you two when it ended but it was pretty damn clear to me that Steve was talking utter shite.”

“You don’t need to stand up for me.”

“You’re keeping me alive.” Bucky responds quietly. “I know Fury sort-of forced you, but I also remember that you wouldn’t have done shit if you really didn’t want anything to do with me.”

The older man goes to open his mouth before snapping it shut again. A deep grimace settles over his features as his browbone protrudes over his eyelids with the irritating twinge of an oncoming headache.

“I’m trying to be a better person.” He mutters after a while, but Bucky doesn’t take his eyes off of the fields whizzing past them. It feels wrong- intrusive, even- to glance at Tony and break the temporary façade of composure. “After him and all his shit- what happened on the night he left, I- fuck. Sorry.”

Bucky purses his lips, and forces himself to slightly tilt his head towards his saviour’s twitching body. “It’s okay.”

A horrible, empty chuckle rumbles through Tony’s chest. “No it’s not.”

“No,” Bucky agrees, and places a hand flat on the middle seat between them as an olive branch. Tony’s tight lips quirk upwards for a second at the gesture. “But you’re trying your best to make it so.”

He realises after the words slip out of his mouth that Tony’s got his eyebrows raised in surprise. 

“What?”

“That was very,” Tony fumbles around for the right word; huge signposts with a plane image on them popping up after every junction to signify that they were close. “Philosophical?”

Bucky snorts. “Hardly.”

“You’re a mysterious man, Barnes.” Tony whispers, his eyes still firmly focused on Bucky’s reddening cheeks. 

“You mean complicated.”

Tony shakes his head, slowly and deliberately. “No: mysterious.”

Their eyes meet for a nanosecond before Bucky’s wrenching his gaze to the floor with a cough. 

_Shit_ , Tony suddenly mentally panics, bubbles of anxiety sweeping up his arms to make him shiver, _I am so fucked_.

He couldn’t lie to himself: seeing Bucky tear down Steve without using his fists and standing up for Tony- a guy he can only remember dating his best friend years ago- is doing somethin’ to him. Something bad, something scary, something-

Rainclouds hang heavy over the car; blue and black marbles of destruction like a bruise. A low ache settles in his lungs and when he exhales it’s like breathing tar. What was he doing? It was evident that he needed to get his emotions in check and start construction again on building those walls that had protected his heart for the first thirty-something years of his life. Bucky’s long eyelashes settle delicately over his skin when he blinks, and Tony finds himself swallowing heavily.

“There better not be any delays on the journey back.” Tony mutters under his breath, but smiles to himself when Bucky looks up questioningly. “Because now I’m more sure than before that we need to get you in that suit.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for sticking with me, sorry the upload has been a little while. Life is crazy.
> 
> Enjoy x


	4. That Damn Suit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony and Bucky return from seeing Steve, and Tony wastes no time in kickstarting the plan. It goes wrong from the start.

When Bucky slams his bedroom door shut behind him _hours_ later, he thumps his head back against the wood and literally breathes a sigh of relief. He slips his eyes closed for a second, and the image of Steve, brimming with fury, looms into his mind. What the fuck had happened? 

His exhausted body drags itself to his single bed (born lonely, huh) as he face-plants onto the sheets with a groan. All the tension floods out of his muscles like honey. He knows he needs to get in the shower to wash off the sticky residue of travelling sweat sticking to his skin, but with every breath he can feel his mind shutting down. Falling asleep feeling safe was a very alien action. By no means did Bucky feel completely safe in the compound, but with no recollection of the last three years, he didn’t see how he could feel any worse. 

Bucky was tiring at the constant restless thrum vibrating through his bones. The ever-growing scarred canyon of irritation caused by his futile memory seemed to increase in annoyance daily. It was highly probable that his kidnappers were going to return, and yet Bucky had no idea who they were, what they wanted, or how they had managed to trap him the last time. 

What use did he actually have anymore?

His borrowed bedroom door swings open with a loud crash and Bucky snaps his head to the intrusion frantically. Luckily, it’s just Tony with an exhausted but slightly bemused smile balancing on his features.

“I know we probably need to sleep, but I’m not gonna waste any time with this.”

Bucky frowns as he spots folded blue material nestled in Tony’s arms. It takes a moment to click, but then Tony shifts on his feet to reveal red and white marks that stutters Bucky’s breathing.

“Fuck- the- is that the Captain America suit?” 

Tony grabs the material by the collar and shakes it out, the torso and legs of the suit cascading to the floor like a waterfall. Up close, Bucky can spot some small tears and specs of red marred to the blue. He didn’t blame Tony for refusing to do anything to the suit after Steve had disappeared. He’d probably flung it in a cupboard in anger and padlocked the door. At least he hadn’t burned it with industrial acid and a lighter, though. They would be in serious trouble then.

“Put it on, and come down to the communal floor. I’ve called an emergency press conference to get you out there to the public.” Tony orders, his voice biting into a professional tone like he’s addressing an employee. “Steve was right, this is a suicide mission; but only if we don’t move fast enough. The devil works hard, but Tony Stark works harder.”

His smile twists up into a smug smile that shows his teeth. Angry marble mosaics of purple and red blotches ring his eyes, making the man look a bit crazed. This scares Bucky, so he just blinks.

“What, now? But we just got back?”

Tony snorts. “Tough shit. Let’s go, New Cap.”

“Tony, no.” Bucky whines but the haggard older man has already thrown the suit over his horizontal form like a blanket. “Not now, please.”

“Shift your ass.” Tony demands as he exits the room, his voice getting quieter and quieter. “Pepper’s got thirty journalists coming in an hour!”

Bucky groans loudly, and Tony allows the brave smirk to fall from his face as he shuts the door behind him.

Fuck. Why was this so hard?

Extracting that suit from the depths of the Avengers’ storage facility had felt like opening an old wound with a scalpel. 

“Hey.” A soft voice says behind him, but Tony doesn’t turn around. He hears a sigh before there’s a gentle hand rubbing across the skin at the back of his neck. Pepper hooks her chin over his shoulder as they both stare at Bucky’s door in silence. On the other side of some wood, Steve’s Achilles heel was stepping into the armour he himself had worn for years. Tony fell in love with Steve in that suit. He had nearly lost Steve in that suit, and now he was using it to save Bucky.

“This is so fucked up.” Tony whispers with a choked exhale. Exhaustion dragged down his limbs until he was sure Pepper was holding him off the ground. “It’s so shit that this is the only way to make this okay.”

“You’re doing the right thing.” Pepper assures him with a nod. “As hard as this may be, you know that you are doing what is best for Bucky, the team, and the world.”

Tony goes to agree with her, but then the disbelief and betrayal igniting Steve’s eyes makes him gag around his words. 

“Am I?”

His body is forcefully spun around until he’s face to face with his best friend. Pepper raises her eyebrows into perfect arches.

“Don’t be stupid,” she shakes his shoulders in her hold. “You _know_ that morphing Bucky into the new Steve is a good idea, even if it does hurt like a bitch.”

“Yeah,” Tony concedes; Pepper entwines her slender fingers with Tony’s own to gently tug him down the stairs to the main floor. “I’m trying my best to remember that.”

That’s a lie. All Tony can think about is the hand-crafted silver engagement ring buried deep in his underwear drawer- a meaningless left-over from three years ago. 

Most of the team are sprawled around the communal living area when Tony and Pepper finally make it down. Clint’s sprawled across an entire sofa in his archer’s suit with his head resting on the solid muscle of Thor’s right thigh. He spots Bruce curled up in an armchair with his laptop balanced precariously on his knees, dressed in dark jeans and a white shirt. Only Nat is nowhere to be seen.

“Here he is!” Clint slurs sleepily and waves at Tony over the back of the furniture. “Two questions: did you kill Steve, and why are we dressed in our battle gear at this time with no mission alerts?”

Tony’s lips quirk up into a fond smile before he’s clearing his throat and letting go of Pepper’s hand. 

“Firstly, no Barton, I didn’t rip out Rogers’ stone heart. Secondly, I called an emergency _shit shove your work clothes on_ alarm in because we’ve got a press conference in a bit to unveil our newest project.”

Clint tuts in confusion. “Huh?”

“Bucky,” Tony retorts with a shake of his head. “The new Captain America?”

“Wait, we’re actually doing this?” Bruce pipes up from his position caved in on himself. “And have you literally just stepped off the plane? You look like you’re about to drop dead.”

Tony swears loudly and throws his hands up in indignation. “Of course we- what the- why does nobody listen to me anymore?”

“I believe what Dr Banner and Clint mean to say is that they didn’t think the plan would happen so soon.” Thor demands attention with his gravelly tone and shrugs. “We only decided what to do a couple of days ago.”

“We don’t have time to stall.” Pepper interrupts. She shakes her hair from its loose confinements of a messy bun as the waves fall in tendrils past her shoulders. “The sooner we show Bucky to be a valuable and protected member of the team, the safer he’s going to be.”

Natasha wanders into the area from the elevator then, her combat gear freshly mended and intimidating (minus the knives, ever since the accident involving Clint revealing pictures of Nat asleep on the Quinjet at a press conference). 

“I had an evening planned of kicking Clint’s ass in the gym, and now we’ve got an emergency PR event. What’s going on?”

“Bucky in Steve’s old suit.” Clint fills her in with an emphasised sniff. “Which is gonna be weird.”

“No it’s not.” Tony lies seriously and points his finger at the Avengers to command their respect. “Do _not_ make this any harder than it has to be.”

A tense silence settles on the group as Nat sends daggers at Clint. Then:

“Guys, this is really tight.”

Tony turns his head minimally towards Bucky’s faraway voice before his heart soars into his mouth. Wandering down the stairs in Steve’s old Cap suit, Bucky looked completely out of the place. He looked powerful, respected and _a goddamn dream_. These were not adjectives anyone had used to describe one Bucky Barnes in the past, but as he sauntered down the steps with a worried frown on his face and the suit’s material accentuating _all_ the right places, Tony didn’t know where to look. The huge star plastered across his chest stretched across his pectoral muscles like cellophane. There was absolutely no way he could spend the next god knows how long wearing that.

“That will have to do for this conference, but I promise that I will engineer a brand-new upgrade for you once we’re done.” Tony says with an exaggerated cough that has Pepper rolling her eyes. “Lookin’ at the suit is kinda making me feel a bit odd.”

Bucky winces and pulls at his crotch area, clearly in some discomfort about the evident difference between his and Steve’s physiques. He bows his legs into some sort of frog crouch and twists at the material until it loosens into saggy folds around his groin.

“I can’t feel my crown jewels.”

Nat winks at him. “We can see em’.”

“ _What?_ ” Bucky trails off into a terrified yelp and bends in half to study the tight material. Tony forces himself to get a grip and shakes his head in disappointment at Nat.

“Widow, no. Bucky, you’re fine for now, but the more I look at that suit, the more I see Steve. We told him to fuck off when he ripped into this plan, so I’m gonna make damn sure we prove him wrong.” He announces and the room falls silent at the haze of sadness circling his words. Clint sighs in awkward exaggeration to dispel the tension.

“We can postpone this until you’ve made Bucky a different suit?” Pepper tries with a nudge to Tony’s ribs.

“We can’t Pep,” Tony shakes his head and blows air between his teeth like a whistle. “We can’t afford to.”

Bucky flicks his eyes up to meet Tony’s hard gaze before he tugs his lower lip into his teeth to bite at the flesh painfully. “Maybe a different colour scheme? I feel like a tablecloth. Plus, the mess of stripes is givin’ me a headache.”

A humoured smile jumps onto Tony’s lips. He can’t remember the last time he’d directed a grin towards anybody wearing that monstrosity. That suit must’ve absorbed so much pain and hate. Fuck. He really needed to make another suit.

Calculations and ideas explode into Tony’s head like fireworks; he finds himself very aware that his eyes were glazing over into a vegetative state of science. Pepper spots it immediately and yanks him back to earth with a sharp poke to his hipbone.

“Yeah okay,” Tony forces himself to reply when Bucky’s hopeful look falls into one of concern at his lack of focus. “Good idea.”

Clint lifts himself up from his position reclined on Thor with a tired groan. “This conference then,” he begins, pulling loose threads from the shoulder of his suit. Damn, he really needed an upgrade too. “Are we going to be showing Bucky off like a new product at an Expo? I quite enjoy pretending to be investing in your science projects.”

The cheeky smirk on his lips disappears at Bruce’s touchy warning growl.

“We’re branding him as Captain America, not a particle presentation.” Pepper reminds him. “The new and improved Captain America. The old Winter Soldier: gone good.”

Nat’s nose twitches up into a wince of scepticism. “Are people gonna buy that?”

“Well we’ve got to hope, because it’s the best plan we’ve got.” The other woman answers with a sarcastic clap. As Tony’s CEO, Pepper had dual roles in the company, and the Avengers. Sometimes, a group of people she could count on two hands were harder to manage than a cohort of over 700.

“Can you all fuck off with Pep for a bit so I can brief Bucky?” Tony snaps, the threat of Nat’s question ramping his anxiety up to one million. The Avengers rise from their languid positions swiftly, and Bruce chastises both Nat and Clint for being insensitive assholes as they leave. 

Bucky shifts from foot to foot nervously as Tony whirls on him once they’re alone. He waits patiently as Tony brushes imaginary flint from his shoulders and shifts the material around his neck until it sits flat against his collarbones properly. A tight expression of panic obscures the man’s animated chocolate eyes. It’s all fine, until Bucky makes the mistake of looking up exactly the same time as Tony, and their eyes freeze onto each other’s. Bucky doesn’t dare move; instead he swallows heavily and watches as heat creeps up Tony’s throat.

Everything goes into slow motion.

Suddenly, Tony’s hands are on his hips. Their eyes deadlock as Bucky’s breath hitches in quiet confusion. He notices the same pain clouding Tony’s haunted orbs, but something different and weirdly new shines in them now. Bucky recognises the heat as _want_.

What the-

“This is such a bad idea.” Bucky whispers; the lack of control he has on voicing his inner thoughts is slightly unnerving, but this fear is immensely overshadowed by the fact that Tony’s biting his lower lip invitingly. 

“Shut up.” The older man growls back with a soft lilt nudging at the vowels. He steps impossibly closer to Bucky without breaking their eye contact until the former assassin can _literally_ feel his body heat. A wave of animalistic protectiveness swells up in Bucky’s abdomen at the hopeful and raw flush to Tony’s cheeks.

Bucky doesn’t dare breathe as Tony’s eyes slip closed. He tilts his head minimally to the left as Tony’s jaw bumps against his own. He ignores the screaming void of voices thrashing through his head at the thousand ways this could end terribly wrong, and smiles to himself. Tony goes to return the smile- honest, and calm, and finally confident- until their lips are millimetres away-

“Tony?” The jagged screech of a stressed Pepper explodes through the closed door. “Bucky?”

Tony jumps away from Bucky as though he’d been burnt. A horrible damaged gasp falls from Bucky’s throat at the sudden loss of warmth- of Tony. The other man stands there with wide, wide eyes as he shakily pushes a hand through his perfect hair and tries to look anywhere but at Bucky. 

Tension unfurls through the enclosed space again and Tony feels like he’s gonna throw up. He clears his throat to loosen the tight clench of shame and yells back: “Yeah?”

“Photographers are here- ‘bout thirty of them!” His right-hand woman bellows back. “Let’s go?”

He tears his eyes back to Bucky’s. Embarrassment claws at his features, his gaze vulnerably dropping down to his shoes as he swallows heavily. Tony wants to _die_. Bucky wants to _run_.

“Coming!” Tony assures Pepper and desperately tries to recover his hoarse voice. There couldn’t be anything wrong with them, not now. Tony had to be unflappable and Bucky had to be the figurehead of confidence. This crazy plan wasn’t going to work if they didn’t adopt their façades. 

It wasn’t going to work if they couldn’t even look at each other.

“I’m sorry.” Bucky coughs quietly. Tony raises his eyebrows in alarm and whines with discontent. “I shouldn’t… ah, I… you sh’go.”

All Tony can do is nod and attempt to not cry. His heart physically aches with regret at swirling this complicated, broken, _beautiful_ man up in a tornado of shit without his full consent. He was a monster.

“Okay.”

Tony practically runs for the door.

Bucky just stands frozen to the floor, and pretends his gaze is following the full form of his saviour exiting the room, and not directly trained on the full, expressive lips he’d nearly kissed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am SO SORRY for the horrific amount of time it took me to upload this chapter. Life is not slowing down, and I'm juggling this with so many other responsibilities. Am I going to give this up? NO! I am loving this fic and I will do everything I can to keep it going.
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> To those lovelies who are leaving Kudos and amazing comments, thank you so much for your continued support. It means the world to me. Love ya!
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> If you enjoyed this, I'm gonna be cheeky and ask you to let me know. Have a good day :)


	5. Shrouded in Black

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky has seen him somewhere before... better get the conference out the way first though.

“For the last time,” Nat hisses into Bucky’s ear, and smacks the hand he’s got plastered to the front of the suit to stretch the material around his thighs uncomfortably. “Stop vandalising the suit!”

“I can’t feel the lower half of my body!” Bucky screeches back in whisper-form, his voice rising multiple octaves into something resembling a pterodactyl. “Leave my balls alone!”

Tony raises a perfectly shaped eyebrow from their right without looking up from his phone. He was frantically communicating with Pepper who was at the front door welcoming the press with elegance and polite handshakes; something Tony was decidedly _not_ that good at.

_I think we may have underestimated the amount of people here_ , Pepper texts, _every person in New York who owns a blog has turned up_.

Tony swallows heavily and just replies: _Good work, baby._

The team were huddled in the wings of the Avengers amphitheatre. It had been Tony’s idea when they’d moved into the compound around the time Steve had left. In the cold light of day, it was essentially a two-hundred seat conference centre with a stage, so the company let it out to local schools that wanted to put on productions when it wasn’t in use.

Bucky felt like he was going to pass out. The suit was unbearably tight- probably because it had been crumpled in a ball for the last few years- and the sheer idea that he was going to be standing in front of people who had ripped him to pieces in the media made him feel sick. It was like being meat on display at a market; raw, naked and helpless. 

“It actually scares me how fast you and Pepper move.” An amused voice says behind them, and Bucky turns his head to find Sam grinning knowingly at him. “I swear this whole concept was only thought of a few days ago?”

“You know I work fast; you’ve been involved for years.” Tony shakes his head, and then Sam’s hand. “Where the hell have you been?”

“Undercover SHIELD mission in Austria.” Sam hooks his fingers through the belt on his Falcon suit with a nod. “Apparently they were going to ask for you, but I reminded them that you’ve refused to do anything for them since Steve left.” His head lightly cocks to the side in quiet thought. “I think they assumed you’d changed your mind by now, but they clearly don’t know how stubborn you are.”

“Headstrong.” Tony corrects, and narrows his eyes. “Asshole.” Then, with a soft pat on the shoulder: “Thank you.”

“Not a problem.” Sam winks at him and pats Bucky’s shoulder in a greeting. “Austrian ladies are beautiful.”

Nat scoffs at his leering smile and edges closer to Tony.

“Do you want us to actually say anything in this?” She asks under her breath. “Like, fight Bucky’s corner or whatever?”

Tony shakes his head. “Not unless you’re directly asked a question. If we all jump in to defend Bucky, they’re all gonna assume we _have_ to back him and that something’s going on.”

“But there is something going on,” Nat says very slowly, her cherry lip gloss shining under the harsh lights. “We’re hiding him from some baddies.”

Tony rolls his eyes. “That’s a secret, Romanoff.”

An amused smile bounces to the assassin’s lips. Even though she could be damn annoying, Tony loved her fiercely. He loved every single one of his colleagues- of his family members. Bucky was included under that umbrella, now. “Oops. Guess you’re the ‘kinda fella who doesn’t listen to a girl’s secrets.”

She raises her eyebrows teasingly and Tony pokes her in the shoulder. “Shut up, Widow.”

Nat bites her lower lip and turns to talk to Clint who’s busy trying to loosen the suit straps around his knees.

Tony takes a deep breath and saunters closer to Bucky, the other man’s expression one of slight alarm and deep concentration. He nudges his knee against Bucky’s calf to get his attention. His brain switches off when Bucky spins to face him, peering down at him from under his lashes. Fuck. He was so, _so_ , screwed.

“You ready for this?” Tony forces himself to spit out. Bucky shakes his head immediately.

“I’m shitting myself.”

Tony wrinkles his nose in mock disgust and prays to every form of Thor that he was coming across as casual, and not the melted mess he felt inside. “In somebody else’s suit?”

Bucky chuckles, but refuses to catch Tony’s gaze. What was he doing? He was so, _so_ , screwed.

“I just wanted to say,” Tony begins with a strained cough and shoves his hands behind him nervously. “Sorry, about earlier. I shouldn’t have- I mean it wasn’t… it- I shouldn’t have done that, alright?”

“No, no, I know, it’s fine!” Bucky nods vigorously, but Tony can’t ignore the sheer _hurt_ shining in Bucky’s captivating eyes. “Don’t worry about it. Forget it even, I have.” Lie.

Tony reels back in shock because _wow, okay, that aches_. Instead, he pushes out a strained chuckle and forcefully smacks a hand down on Bucky’s shoulder in comradery. 

“Thanks.”

Thor watches them from the corner of the wings, Mjölnir rotating round and round in his hands. He casts the two men a confused gaze but doesn’t interrupt the conversation. After all, sometimes it was useful to just observe. 

“Are you not Iron Man-ing up for this?” Bucky says, and Tony presses the arc reactor shining from the middle of his chest with a smile. The suit starts to fold over his body like liquid, dripping from every vertex before it catches and moulds to his shape. It’s exquisite, and Bucky can’t help but watch with an open mouth.

Pepper texts Tony with a thirty second warning. The hubbub from the theatre was growing close to deafening.

“Alright, Avengers, let’s do this.” Tony announces and everyone stiffens in their postures to create the façade of superheroes. They move in beautiful synchronisation to form a line and Bucky stops panicking after a second as he remembers that they’ve done this before. The Accords spring to mind and he chokes down a grimace. Bruce and Sam grab either side of Bucky to manoeuvre him between them as the curtain starts to rise. Tony’s faceplate slides down over his face, and suddenly they’re in business. 

With every inch the curtain rose came a new line of scores of yelling journalists and flashing cameras invading Bucky’s senses. The whole thing was overwhelming and suddenly he was back in hell. Tony takes charge and steps forward to wave professionally at the cameras. His faceplate opens to reveal his grinning, PR ready smile and Bucky’s stomach flips slightly. 

The other Avengers follow suit until they’re all grinning at the cameras in battle poses. Feeling more out of place than he had since arriving at the compound, Bucky copies them. It feels like as soon as he actually moves, the screaming increases until it’s one wall of white noise.

Tony must see him wince, because he holds one of Iron Man’s hands up to silence the crowd and unbelievably, it works. The press calm down into a quite bustle of questions that die down as Tony makes no attempt to talk.

“Good evening.” He then bellows. “I’m very sorry that this is such short notice, but I’d just like to say thank you for coming. Today, you are here as the first people worldwide to meet the newest member of the Avengers. The New Captain America if you will- James Buchanan Barnes.”

Tony points his palms towards Bucky and the team claps obediently. However, Bucky can’t miss how deathly silent the amphitheatre falls as two hundred pairs of eyes stare at him in complete shock.

“The Winter Soldier?” Someone spits from the second row and Tony glares at them dangerously. 

“That was an unfortunate title that our friend Bucky was burdened with during a period of horrific scientific experimentation and indoctrination.” He demands and Nat nods next to him.

Not getting the message, the journalist turns to Bucky with venomous green eyes. “You killed countless people.” They snap. “Now you’re gonna start all over again in the name of peace?”

Bucky clears his throat; Tony snarls inwardly and balls his hands into fists. “I’ve been given this amazing opportunity to take on the Captain America mantle and do some good.” He replies carefully, awkwardly aware of how badly his voice was shaking. “After all of the unforgivable things I’ve done, I want my chance to try and bring peace.”

“If you know that killing countless innocent people is ‘unforgivable’,” another shouts, “Why are you expecting the world to forget your crimes?”

“Well-”

“Yeah!” The person next to the first one chimes in. “There are some people that would happily see you get locked away forever for what you’ve done, or worse. After all, the Accords-”

“Where’s your shield?” One shrieks and Bucky’s eyes widen helplessly. Luckily, Tony jumps in again to save him.

“A new Captain America requires an updated shield.” He replies firmly. “One is in the works; I can assure you.” 

Bucky wonders if that’s true.

“Where have you been for the last few years?” A male voice yells from the side. “Wakanda?”

Embarrassed, Bucky looks down to his feet. “I’m afraid I can’t answer that.” He murmurs, _because I don’t know_.

That was clearly the entirely wrong thing to say as the indignant shouts get louder. 

Bucky surveys the room in absolute desperation. All he could see were numerous murderous faces shining flashes in his eyes and bombarding him with questions left, right and centre. 

A man, sat right in the middle of the seating, catches Bucky’s eye. He perches completely still with no equipment in sight, and sticks out like a sore thumb. A scruffy leather jacket clings to his shoulders, and he had vibrant tattoos curling up the left side of his neck to his ear. Pure hatred glimmered in his leaden grey eyes and his mouth contorts up into a sadistic smirk. Familiarity clung to the guy like mud but Bucky couldn’t for the life of him identify from where. 

He was well aware that he was still being pelted with accusations. Sam and Bruce were glancing at each other with worry when Bucky spluttered his way through some more apologies and promises that he was turning his life around. The whole thing was a car-crash, speedily travelling towards a cliff.

Out of nowhere, Tony jumps forward to demand attention. Clint steps back quickly before the Iron Man suit can flatten his toes. 

“Listen up, ladies and gentlemen of the media.” He practically hollers and the entire space quietens within a second. They all knew from experience that pissing off Tony Stark was more of a headache than it should be. “I feel like you are greatly underappreciating what a fantastic addition to the team this man will be. He’s determined, intelligent, powerful, intuitive and has a bigger resumé than you know.” Tony’s brain goes to wax lyrical poetry about Bucky’s eyes but he stops himself, knowing full well that it _wasn’t_ the time. “I acknowledge your reservations about his past- rightly so- but I believe that everyone deserves a second chance.” 

Apart from Steve Rogers, his brain also adds, but he forcefully bites his lip.

“He admits his mistakes, but we have to remember that it wasn’t Bucky. It was an artificial puppet using his body to carry out HYDRA’s bidding. I had my fears about him entering the compound at the beginning too. However, after reconnecting with him the last few days, I know for a fact that he’s a good person. He’s got a great heart, and ultimately that’s all you need to be an Avenger.”

Pepper shoots him a thumbs up from the wings so Tony gestures to the team. They exit the stage smiling as hard as they did coming on, with the racket from the media louder than ever. 

Bucky doesn’t notice them leaving. His eyes are firmly trained on the five other men in the audience, wearing matching obscure jackets, and the exact same crazed, loathing glare. 

-

Steve punches the off button on the TV remote a _little_ harder than was necessary.

The screen whines, hurt, and shrinks to black. Silence falls on the house, the only sound being the irritated drum of Steve’s right foot on the carpeted floor.

“Absolute fucker.” He hisses to himself, wringing his fingers from his mouth down to his lap and back up again. Watching the press conference had been a huge mistake. In reality, he should’ve let that part of his life stay as dormant as it had for the last three years. But, Bucky was his weakness, even more so than Alannah. The mere idea that Bucky could be in danger drove him to watching the PR event just to make sure everything was okay. Now, he was even more riled up than he had been when Tony had visited. “What a fucking waste.”

Seeing Bucky in his old Captain America suit, the one he had actually worn himself _for fucks sake_ , had sent ripples of electricity reverberating down Steve’s spine. His foot continues to bounce against the ground in an uneven rhythm that seemed to be increasing by the second.

The loud crash of the front door opening and closing yanks him from his thoughts. Steve hears shopping bags dropping to the floor before a cheerful: “I’m back, sweetheart!”

“Hey baby,” Steve calls back, mindful to keep his voice even. “Good day?”

“Bearable.” His fiancé replies with a tired huff as she bustles into the kitchen. “Jesus though, those kids are gonna be the death of me someday.”

Steve rises from the sofa to join the woman in the kitchen. Alannah keeps her back to him, her beautiful red hair tumbling in curls past her shoulders, streaks of rose gold glimmering under the lights. She babbles on about her day (“I mean, why was she sticking a pencil up her nose in the first place, for feck’s sake?”) whilst throwing the food haul into the cupboards. Steve watches her with a small smile on his lips; the flames in his veins dissipating _slightly_ with each second.

She turns, halfway through her sentence, to judge Steve’s reaction to the questionable choice her colleague had made regarding display colour schemes. The placid smile on her face tightens into a pinched grimace.

“What’s wrong?”

Steve narrows his eyes. “Nothing-”

“Don’t you ‘nothing’ me,” Alannah retorts, jabbing the box of spaghetti she was holding in Steve’s chest. “I know you. What’s happened?”

Knowing there was no use hiding anything from his headstrong future wife, Steve caves with a sigh. The cool counter top jabs into his coccyx as he bends down to lean his lower back against the surface with his legs bowed out in front of him. He crosses his arms and Alannah raises her eyebrows.

“Tony and Bucky went through with the shit Cap idea. They did a press conference that aired first thing this morning- they must’ve organised it for when they got back after coming here. People were a bit asshat-like about it first but then they realised they could violate Buck for all he’s worth in that fuckin’ suit and they jumped on him.”

Alannah blinks blankly. “What does any of that have to do with you? You’ve spent god knows how long swearing that Captain America isn’t part of your identity anymore and a part of you that you wanna leave in America. Why does this bother you so much?”

Steve blows air between his teeth bluntly. “It doesn’t bother me as much as it-”

“You’re literally quaking on the spot,” Alannah points out with a snort. “I’d say it does bother you.”

“I couldn’t care less what Tony does, but I warned him not to involve Bucky in that world, especially after the Winter Soldier.”

“You know that’s not true.” Alannah retorts. “You _do_ care, that’s why you’re so annoyed.” 

She makes total sense, and Steve hates that. He did care, even though he shouldn’t. The Avengers, both the concept and the people, were no longer his constants. Why was he so fucking angry about this when he was determined he wasn’t?

“Tony went behind my back with this.” He growls and thumps his fist down on the counter, causing nearby glasses to rattle. “I specifically warned him to leave Bucky alone and not get him involved in that shit-show, but did he listen? Did he fuck.”

With the pain and distortion of three years of chaos crashing through his soul, Steve straightens his body and stalks towards the kitchen door.

“Hey.” Alannah catches him on the arm on the way out and Steve can’t stop staring at the creases of concern etched into her forehead. She looks tired and fed-up; pretty much mirroring the torrent of emotion crashing through Steve’s stomach. “You need to calm down.”

“I’m fine.” He snaps back, pulling his limb from her grasp to unlock the front door. “I just need some time.”

“Sweetheart-” Alannah begins, but Steve rudely cuts her off by slamming the door behind him as he steps out into the crisp evening breeze. 

Fuck. That was a dick move.

Eager to get some proper space where he wasn’t being hounded by concrete towers, Steve switches off his thoughts and heads to the nearest park. His fists clench into his palms to create crescent indents from his nails.

Nobody gave him any attention as he marched through the streets. After all, he was just another citizen in Kinsale dressed in a jacket and jeans. He’d somehow spent the last three-ish years flying under the radar and he was not willing to mess it all up now. God, he’d been an asshole to Alannah. The woman deserved the world and so far Steve was struggling with one continent. 

“Fucking Stark,” Steve mutters to himself as he wanders through the park, kicking mounds of soil and a few stray tennis balls left from forgetful dog walkers. “With his money and his team and his-”

_Snap_

The unmistakable sound of footsteps hollow on grass causes Steve to stop dead in his tracks. Thanks to his serum-enhanced hearing, even the softest squelch of a foot against mud was like jumping on gravel. Careful to keep his peripheral vision facing the trees, Steve swings out his body to make a wide stance towards the huge field. He waits, frozen still with the only sound being the soft rise and fall of his chest still working through frustration, and stares out into the black. 

His vision tunnels into careful focus as he tries to make out any shapes in the gloom, but it’s useless. The park was empty- completely, eerily empty. Steve’s hackles rise as his fear heightens. He heard those footsteps, so there was somebody else here. The fact that he couldn’t see them, or hear them, meant he was in serious danger.

He starts to walk down the perimeter of the field whilst turning and facing the trees every few steps to survey his space. Every step caused his heart to beat faster as he was _fucking sure_ that he wasn’t alone. Wind envelopes the woods with fierce violence and screams through his hair. Steve shivers in spite of himself, and hated how _vulnerable_ he felt. He hadn’t felt this fragile since he’d left Tony and it was not a welcome change.

An atavistic fear clenches round his heart as he becomes overwhelmed with the urge to start running. His feet pound along the grass; the metal dull skeleton of the far gate looming into view. Steve’s temples start to pulse erratically, but it wasn’t down to determination like it had been in the Avengers, but rather the cotton-wool thrashing behind his eyes was the devastating burn of _regret_.

Out of nowhere, an excruciating fire explodes over the small of his back, radiating from just above his pelvis and crackling down his thighs. Steve screams, before the strength in his legs dissipates like evaporating water. Everything grew blurry at the edges, like water damage on photos. His knees collapse to the ground and Steve’s torso follows immediately like a domino.

A silent figure shrouded in black saunters calmly up to him passed out cold. The stranger reaches down and plucks the industrial scale tranquiliser dart- complete with neon pink feathers and all- from Steve’s spine with a sadistic smirk, and brings his foot down _hard_ on his prey’s shoulders with a resounding crack. 

-

It wasn’t until lunchtime the following day that Bucky came face to face with Tony again.

Tony was engaged in some deep thinking, judging by the deep crevices that puckered the skin around his eyes. Intricate holograms of a figure outline in pixelated blue circled Tony’s workbench as he welded something together with deep concentration. A box labelled ‘nanites’ catches Bucky’s attention, but he doesn’t make any attempt to move from his position at the door. After the chaos of the press conference, and after Tony had stood up for him so fiercely, it felt wrong to disturb his flow. Plus, he was enjoying watching the blanket of calm that had settled over Tony’s demeanour. It was an atmosphere he didn’t often see.

“Okay, Fri, zoom in on the reverse left shoulder for me?”

The hologram tightens into its centre and elegantly spins so Tony can study the specific area closely. His hands carry on tinkering beneath him, even though his gaze stays trained on the design. Then he stops and the focused expression he’d adopted falls away into one of scepticism. 

“I’m not sure this is gonna give the stretch required, Fri- pull up some more compounds for me to try?”

“Yes boss,” Friday answers airily before her tone drops into fond amusement. “Sergeant Barnes has been standing at the door for quite some time, maybe you should consult him?”

Tony’s head whips up to search towards the door; his surprised grimace melting into a smile. “Oh, hi. You’ve never been down here?”

“I thought I’d come and see how you’re doing.” Bucky nods but keeps his feet firmly planted on the floor. He was well aware of the respect Tony demanded for his lab. “Plus, it’s not like I’ve got anything else to do.”

“I’m flattered.” Tony retorts flatly and rolls his eyes at Bucky’s hesitation. “You can come in, by the way.”

Bucky immediately winds his hands behind his back to step into the lab carefully. His eyes light up at the horrifyingly advanced technology Tony had in the room, but with all the respect of a solider he keeps his limbs to himself with metallic regiment. Tony goes to snort at his behaviour, before realising that Bucky was in fact trying to respect his space, and his lips quirk up into a soft smile.

“Come here, I wanna show you something.” He calls to Bucky, the other man side-stepping a tray of tools that had been left lying around with raised eyebrows. Tony flicks his wrist up to project a huge hologram above the main floor and Bucky’s mouth drops open.

It’s Bucky in hologram form (the same technology that had projected Rhodey into the Quinjet when this shitstorm began; a concept Tony was _particularly_ proud of) and clad in the suit Tony was meticulously crafting. The suit was by no means, beautiful. By looking at the hologram, it looked to be an unforgiving dark navy, but Tony knew he wanted the end result to be black. He wanted black, to finally achieve a division between Steve and Bucky. Unfortunately, the new suit carried over some of the trademark Cap details (the embroidered star across the chest and the midsection stripy car-crash) but that was for PR logistics only; to _prove_ that Bucky was serious in his new role. Tony zooms in on the hologram with his index finger and thumb to focus on the midriff of the torso. The vertical bars on the new suit were in a brilliant array of jet black and silver. Hologram-Bucky nods and winks at the both of them to assure his confidence in the new uniform. Real-life Bucky swallows heavily. 

“I know it’s black, like the Winter Soldier one was,” Tony begins, and swipes the back of his wrist against his jaw, a faint smudge of grease marring the white as he does so. “But hear me out- it’s completely different to the abhorrent patterning on the old Cap suit.”

Bucky’s lips quirk upwards, even though the offhand reminder of his past is squashing his organs together like playdoh. “Are you only saying that because you didn’t design the original suit?”

“Yep,” Tony replies and continues tidying the bombsite up around his desk whilst shooing away the robots clamouring around his feet attempting to help. “My god, Howard did a shit job with that.”

Bucky can’t help but laugh at that, the amused wheeze to his chuckle crisp and genuine. Even though the press conference could have gone a lot, _lot_ better, a visible weight had been lifted from the taller man’s shoulders. The world was perhaps willing to accept him again, albeit some conditions that Tony inwardly thought was fair enough. It was hard trusting someone who had hurt you- Tony knew that better than anyone else, goddamnit.

“I- I don’t really know what to say.” Bucky says quietly and completely out of the blue. Tony looks up from where he’s jamming some goggles into a drawer with mild surprise. The vulnerable hesitation encompassing the way Bucky’s refusing to catch his gaze causes Tony to narrow his eyes and abandon the polycarbonate safety wear. “I don’t feel like I deserve this.”

“A new suit?” Tony folds his arms, but in confusion rather than defence. “Why? You’re the new Captain America, it makes sense?”

“Yeah but,” Bucky trails off before moving further round the table until he reaches Tony to slouch against the surface. “I’feels like we’re cheating the world out of somethin’ promising, you know?”

Tony feels his hackles rise but forces himself to exhale deeply. “Nope.”

“Steve was Cap because he wanted to save people and bring some good to the world.” Bucky basically whispers, his lower lip catching between his teeth. “And I’m taking on the mantle to save my own ass.”

“Nobody’s saying you can’t be Earth’s newest mighty hero, or whatever the fuck they call us.” The genius counteracts with a shrug, his freshly washed hair flopping momentarily over his eyebrows before he shakes it off with a pointed blink. “They don’t know the real reason you’re here, nor do they need to. All they wanna see is you living up to the expectation they had with Steve. I know you’re gonna exceed their expectations, Bucky.”

Bucky opens his mouth to disagree before snapping it shut at Tony’s pleading tone. He stands up from his position resting against the table and goes to walk away but Tony catches his upper arm. A horrible, trapped suffocation that Bucky hadn’t felt in years climbs its way up his throat and suddenly he’s back in the army, knowing it wouldn’t be long before his world turned black and hazy.

“Hey,” Tony’s worried voice sounds rushed and faraway. There are hands gently cradling his jaw. Bucky forces himself to exhale through the anxiety and focus on the warmth radiating into his teeth from the other man’s fingers. “No, no- Buck- don’t do that. Hey, focus on me. You’re okay, I’ve got you.”

Fuzzy constellations of black loom into Bucky’s vision when his eyes clear to concentrate on the panicked frown masking Tony’s face. It’s like looking straight into the static of a broken TV; the damage of lost signal on a device made to project dreams. Bucky feels like that sometimes: a broken TV set with all the right cables connected but not enough power to make it work.

He senses the words forming before he can halt himself. “You’re so beautiful.”

Tony does a visible double take, the grip on Bucky’s face hardening. “Have you concussed yourself?”

“No,” Bucky shakes his head minutely, still not able to move in between the strong grasp. “M’telling the truth. You’re so beautiful- I don’t know how I’ve never seen you from this angle before.”

“That last time you were this close to my face, you were trying to kill me.” Tony points out. Bucky whimpers like a wounded animal and tries to step back. All he gets for his trouble is one of the hands slipping down to cup the side of his neck and rub circles along his veins soothingly. “That doesn’t mean I want you to step back.”

“What do you want me to do then?” Bucky asks, a frustrated laugh hardening his accent. “Because I am _so_ lost.”

Tony sighs heavily, his mind made up. As terrifying as it seemed, he knew exactly what he needed to do.

“Close your eyes.”

Bucky obeys.

Nothing happens. Then, he feels gentle, tentative pressure against his lips and realises that Tony Stark- the man who _saved him_ \- was kissing him.

Bucky’s mouth widens with a shocked gasp and Tony takes his cue. He slots their lips together properly and revels in the lazy heat that unfurls through his body. Careful not to tighten his grasp against Bucky’s sensitive neck, he runs his hand down the skin to sit on the man’s collarbone. The other hand stays at Bucky’s jaw, caressing the muscles there as he allows his fingers to splay behind the ear. They trade kisses for a few minutes before Tony becomes painfully aware that Bucky’s own hands were bumping clumsily against his hipbones. He pulls back to cast an arched eyebrow at Bucky, who just bites his lip and flutters his long eyelashes in response.

The wandering fingers skip Tony’s waist until they rest questioningly at his waistband. Without bothering to give an answer, Tony attaches their lips together once more and walks Bucky backwards a few steps until he feels the edge of the workbench press into the man’s thighs. Bucky groans into Tony’s mouth as the wood collides with the sweet spot underneath the soft curve of his ass cheeks and Tony’s brain short-circuits as _oh_ , he thinks, _that was definitely something to remember_. 

Obviously, because neither of them could catch a break as fate was truly out to get them, Tony’s phone starts to ring from his back pocket. He freezes for a heartbeat and Bucky grimaces into their kiss. Tony really should get it but-

He pulls back to study Bucky’s kiss-bitten lips and hazy eyes. “Ah, fuck it.” Tony decides and pushes Bucky further back against the surface to kiss him again.

The buzzing starts up again louder and sharper than before, like a warning.

“Noooo,” Bucky whines against Tony’s lips and goes to tuck his head into the junction between the shorter man’s neck and shoulder. “Tell them to fuck off.”

Tony laughs softly and gently pushes Bucky’s head away from peppering kisses down the column of his throat to grab his phone. The caller ID isn’t recognised, which instantly makes Tony suspicious. He’d programmed safety procedures into all of the tech at the compound to deter hackers, so it was extremely weird that somebody he didn’t have saved as a contact was calling his personal phone.

Bucky catches the confused grimace balanced on Tony’s features and pokes at his temple with a frown. “I know that scowl.”

“No caller ID.” Tony mutters to himself before hesitantly accepting the call and enabling loudspeaker so Bucky could hear. “Hello?”

Heavy breathing crackles through the speaker. Then, a very panicked: “Tony Stark?”

Tony’s eyebrows shoot into his hairline. The female voice was one he definitely recognised, and one that made him feel sick to his stomach. Attentive as ever, Bucky’s eyes widen into huge saucers of concern as he cups Tony’s elbow with one palm.

“Alannah?”

“Thank god I managed to find your number.” Alannah chokes out, her voice a cacophony of alarm. “I need your help, I mean- I’d understand if you don’t want to but I don’t know who else to ask because the police are just gonna-”

“Hey.” Tony abruptly halts her terrified rambling seriously. With every passing second the Irish lilt to her words was becoming even more pronounced; Bucky remembered he would slip more _in’ta his Brooklyn dialect_ when Steve had been a moron and got himself hurt when they were younger. “You need to calm down, and take a breath. Now, explain to me exactly why you are calling.”

“He was pissed off about the press conference, something about you going behind his back? I thought he was jus’ going to have a walk around but that was _hours_ ago and he hasn’t gone AWOL in _ages_ …”

“What?” Tony yelps and clenches onto Bucky’s arm when he winds it around his waist securely. “Who?”

It was a stupid question and one Tony already knew the answer to. Fuck. 

“Steve,” Alannah breathes down the phone, close to tears, and every organ in Tony’s pathetic body freezes to send cramps ricocheting through his muscles. “He’s missing.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Peers up from behind her screen* Hello? Is anybody still there?
> 
> Well... that has taken me so bloody long. So, I've written a longer chapter as compensation.
> 
> Guys, I'm gonna be honest with you. I've got Very Important Exams (A-levels) coming up in a month. They have to take priority for me because I need my grades to get into my chosen uni. I love updating this as regularly as I can, but I can't see me posting another chapter before mid-June which is when my exams finish. This sucks, I know, but it's the only solution I can come up with... I don't want my writing to be shitty if I'm stressing about my papers, you know?
> 
> Anyway, we'll just have to see what happens. Thank you for reading this, and if you can keep your eyes peeled for the next chapter in a couple of months I would be very, very grateful.
> 
> X


	6. Falling Into Place

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Life isn't black and white.
> 
> It's multi-tonal grey. Grey, and murky, and messy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: Mentions of: torture (mildly graphic but not too bad), vomit, psychological trauma, emotional instability and abuse. Please tread carefully if any of these things are triggers to you.
> 
> Hello there! This chapter is up MUCH earlier than I thought it would be. Writing seems to be my best exam stress-reliever at the moment which is why this chapter is posted now and not mid-June like I'd anticipated.
> 
> Happy reading! (This chapter is quite dark though, so I mean 'happy' as in I hope you find it fulfilling, and not that you'll be skipping through rainbow fields after you've finished it :))

“What the fuck?” Bucky bites out tearfully as he and Tony take the elevator from the lab to the communal floor in the compound. Time was _crawling_ past. Each passing second felt like years and the palpable tension hanging between the two men in the enclosed space was not helping matters. “What the actual _fuck_ is going on?”

Tony grits his jaw and shifts his weight between his feet like a pendulum. He yearns to fix Bucky with a stone-cold stare and tell him that _he doesn’t fucking know, except Steve is missing which a complete clusterfuck of a situation_ but he knows that Bucky isn’t just questioning Steve’s disappearance. He’s alluding to his own apparent kidnapping, the doctored amnesia and the targeting of both of Earth’s only known super-soldiers in a matter of weeks. 

“We’ll sort it.” He chooses to say, firmly. Bucky just grits his jaw as the elevator doors slide open.

“Tony-”

“We’ll sort it.” Tony repeats with a sharp nod, and then a softer, “I promise” at the way Bucky tilts his head to the ceiling in annoyance. 

The team are already gathered around the table in the kitchen when they march in, matching their confused and slightly scared expressions perfectly. Sam’s fists are clenching and unclenching at his waist like he’s two seconds away from ripping someone to shreds. Bucky knows exactly how he feels.

“Where’s Clint and Thor?”

“Emergency op in Japan.” Nat says briskly and nods at them both. “Sorry, it all happened a bit quick.”

Tony flaps his hands around. “It’s fine, but they can’t be away for too long. We need them.”

“He’s really missing?” Bruce checks and downs the dregs of his coffee quickly. Tony’s breath hitches at the pity glimmering through his team’s carefully guarded expressions.

“Apparently, according to his fiancé. He seems to have been gone for hours, which apparently is totally out of character.”

“Some things never change.” Sam whispers to Nat and she nods lightly. They jump when Tony clears his throat pointedly and stabs his index finger down on the table. 

“He is purely a missing person who we have been asked to find because the police are quite frankly useless and don’t want to find him anyway.”

Bruce crosses his arms. “When you say the word ‘missing’, you do mean kidnapped don’t you?”

Tony dissolves into a massive whine that sounds like he’s trying to conceal a yawn. “Most likely, which makes this a thousand times harder than it already is.”

“With Steve being… well, Steve, somebody’s probably using him to cash in a massive payday.” Sam murmurs. Bucky nods sharply, still feeling incredibly fragile. Ever since he’d stepped foot on the compound, trouble had managed to find him. He’d not even been at the fucking place for a whole week.

“What would someone want with Steve?” Nat sets their protocol in motion as she begins organising. The Avengers never used to be very good at asking the right questions before barrelling in, which was something Tony had been very quick to change when Steve had left. 

Tony just fixes her with a _look_.

“I really hope that’s a joke.”

“Has any terror cell come to light recently that could be involved?” Bruce takes the reigns, clearly sensing tension brewing. They were all walking on eggshells.

“Just the bastards who were involved in Bucky’s disappearance.” Sam poses. Tony nods and immediately dives for his phone to access their encrypted files with the information on all the underground gangs being infiltrated by the UN and other secret agencies. Hopefully, it might give them somewhere to start.

“You’re being very quiet.” Nat nudges Bucky; the lost look in his eyes disappearing when he jolts. He just shrugs and clears his throat.

“This is new territory, and worrying as hell.”

Nat doesn’t let it go. She turns her body to properly face him and narrows her eyebrows in judgment.

“No, you’re hiding something.”

Tony looks up from the screen, blue illuminations shaping his cheeks. “Yeah, you are. Something’s happened. Even if you don’t think it’s anything, we need to know.” 

Sam drops his chin as a gentle push and Bucky cracks. He threads his fingers through his hair and breathes out on a jarring exhale. 

“At the press event,” He says, his chin trembling dangerously as he speaks. “There was a guy there an’ I didn’t think anything of it, except he was wearing this leather jacket and then I noticed that were about five other guys there who were all wearing the same thing-”

“What?!” Tony shrieks and nearly drops his phone. “Why the _fuck_ didn’t you say anything?”

“I don’t know!” Bucky yells back and smacks his hands to his neck to entwine his fingers behind the pale column. “If I thought badly of every person I’ve ever met, I wouldn’t trust anybody.”

“You don’t trust anybody.” Nat says seriously, and then yelps when Sam kicks her.

“I take it we’re assuming that these men are the guys who have Steve?” Bruce chimes in and fishes for his glasses from his pocket.

“That’s a big assumption.” Sam counteracts before pointing at Bucky. “They’re clearly creepy as hell, but he’s the one they were sniffin’ around, not Steve.”

“That we know of.”

Nat shakes her head and rounds on Tony. “Did Steve’s fiancé mention anything weird?”

“Alannah?” Tony looks surprised. “No, I don’t think so? She didn’t say anything, and I’m sure she would’ve done if it was necessary. She wants him back safe.”

He tries to keep all of the emotion from leaking into his voice but clearly fails, judging by the worried frown clouding Nat’s features. 

“I’m sorry, but there’s got to be something odd going on with the leather jacket boyband.” He then grimaces and braces his weight against the table. “It’s too big of a coincidence.”

“But why were they _here_ , watching me?” Bucky hisses and gnaws at the inside of his lip.

“I don’t know, surveying their latest project?” Tony spits, rather harshly. Bucky cowers under his glower, but then steadies the man’s gaze with indignation.

“I didn’t fucking _know_ that they were psychos.” He snaps back dangerously. “I would’ve said something if I’d thought it was important.”

Tony scoffs and rolls his eyes all the way to the ceiling. “You should’ve told us.”

“Tony,” Bucky begins, a hint of fire creeping into his already pissed-off tone. “I didn’t automatically assume they were bad guys.”

Nat scrunches her nose up in disbelief. “Why? Leather jackets, Bucky!”

“At what point of my life would I have needed to identify the bad guys?” Bucky actually shouts then, having lost all composure. “I was the bad guy! I was the danger, who was being identified! All those killings- I was told who to target, I was never the one in control!”

Everyone winces and falls silent. Bruce sighs and sidles up next to Bucky to pat him gingerly on the back. 

“We get that, honestly we do. We’re sorry. I guess the Avengers are used to team members automatically nailing the coffin shut with one single look. It shouldn’t-” he falters and makes a point to glare accusingly at Tony. “ _We_ shouldn’t expect that from you yet.”

Bucky whines under his breath but they all hear it. “Now I feel like a failure. Steve, the actual Captain America, would’ve known they were dodgy.”

“Steve’s an asshole.” Tony demands aggressively. Nobody disagrees with him. “But he’s an asshole we’ve been asked to find.”

“Find and rescue op?” Nat guesses.

Tony shakes his head to himself before straightening up. “Brilliant. I don’t know what I did to deserve this. My fucking life, I swear to god.”

-

When Steve opens his eyes, it’s to blinding darkness. He felt like he’d been asleep for _days_ and the velocity with which the room was spinning did not help how cotton-wool heavy his head was. His eyelids crack open a couple of millimetres to survey the space for any danger, but he drags them closed again in sweet relief when the atmosphere starts pulsating in his synapses.

“Fuck,” he swears softly to himself and engages his shoulder joint to bring a hand up to his temples. “Jesus fucking Christ, man.”

Except, his shoulder jars gratingly and shudders in its socket. Steve freezes with cold fear washing over his body as he attempts to move his arm again. Nothing happens. He wiggles his fingers experimentally and exhales quickly when the pads of all ten fingers make contact with his palms. He didn’t seem to be paralysed, then. Fully aware that he needed to open his eyes to be able to make a better assessment of what the fuck was happening, Steve forces himself to settle back in consciousness. 

He realises, very quickly, that the alarming pain radiating from his neck and collarbones was coming from the unnatural position his shoulders had been forced back into. Steve was upright and sat on a floor leaning against a wall. His arms had been pinned behind his back and were slowly going numb under his weight due to the fact that they were both trapped between him and the stone. Something was binding his wrists together at the base of his spine and when he jangles the manacles, the sting of rusting metal bites into the skin. Steve groans in pain and disorientation, his fingers splaying out against the ground to ground himself in the present. Shit, he hated anything that knocked him out. He especially hated anything that knocked him out for this long, because that meant the product was industrial- military, even- scale if it was able to floor him this badly. He definitely wasn’t at home and there was a very strong chance he wasn’t even still in Ireland. All of these possibilities pointed to something HYDRA-esque and _that_ was fucking unbelievable. 

Out of nowhere, two black boots materialise in his vision. Steve freezes, and through holding his breath becomes alarmingly aware that somebody else’s exhalations were floating into the brick. Sluggishly, he forces his eyes upwards.

Tattered jeans, scruffy black leather jacket, vibrant neck tattoo, metal-dull eyes.

The man grins at Steve, showing off a bright red scar that tore through the arch of his lower lip. A yellow tinge stuck to his skin, put there by years of smoking pollution and he seemed to be vibrating on the spot. He looked… excited? Gleeful, but also seven sorts of crazy.

“Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes?”

His voice was on the verge of breaking every other syllable. Steve scoffs and leans his head back to will away the tendrils of hair poking at his eyes.

“Could well say the same thing to you.”

The stranger throws his head back and laughs hysterically like Steve’s the funniest person in the world. He smacks a hand down onto his thigh in mirth, the thunder clap making Steve wince.

“Fuck me, the science experiment has a sense of humour? Didn’t see tha’ coming, I can assure ya’.” He walks to the edge of the room, past Steve’s peripheral vision, and comes back with a box. The box is thrown down onto the floor and the danger lowers himself onto it gingerly so he’s perched right in front of Steve.

Steve pretends to yawn. “I’ve been kidnapped before,” he says even though it’s an outright lie. “I would appreciate it if you could hurry the fuck up and tell me why I’m here?”

All he gets in return is a long blink.

“Jax Ambia,” the man suddenly says, his whole face lighting up animatedly. He has the audacity to thrust his palm forwards, outstretched, like he wants to shake Steve’s hand. “Good to meet ya’.”

Steve just glares daggers at the hand, before sarcastically shaking his wrist restraints for good measure. 

Ambia laughs. “Point taken.”

“You’re HYDRA?” Steve guesses.

“No,” Ambia rolls his eyes and pulls the sleeves of his leather jacket further down his wrists. “HYDRA is dead- long gone. Thank god. They were shit. Brought down by a bunch’a creeps. That’s you, by the way.”

“I guessed.” Steve replies, deadpan.

Ambia doesn’t offer any more detail. He just sits there quietly and waits with a blank look for Steve to question him further. 

“SHIELD?”

“No. They’re dead, too.”

“Traffickers?”

“Nah. Nobody would want you.”

“Hitmen?”

“Nah. Nobody would pay good money to just kill you and not get anything out of it.”

Steve growls in frustration. “What the fuck are you then?”

Ambia’s lips twist upwards into a sadistic smirk. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small transformer with a switch. His fingers toy with it for a moment, before suddenly he flicks it open with his nail and-

Pain. All Steve can feel is pain. His body convulses out into mangled starfish shapes to escape the pain inferno whipping at his nerves. Ambia’s laughing, but Steve can’t hear him over his desperate screams.

It was like being flogged all over, but with whips made of fire, nails and blades. Every second was pure and utter torture as his broken body was shocked again and again and again. Steve cries over his shrieks; if he wasn’t bleeding after this it would be a miracle. Skin sometimes bursts under pressure, and with this level of excruciation it wouldn’t be surprising if his whole body tore open to soak the floor with his insides. 

As quick as it came, the active pain stops. Steve takes in huge gulps of clean air and shudders under his tears. Fuck _me_.

Ambia crouches down in front of him and lifts his chin up to look him directly in the eyes.

“I’m a scientist.” He says, and before Steve can beg for his life, the pain snaps back on again and all Steve can do is scream. 

-

Suddenly, Bucky falls to the ground with a hoarse cry. His hands reach up to claw at the sides of his head as his eyes roll backwards.

Tony goes to run towards him but Sam grabs him and holds him back. “Don’t be stupid!” Sam yells at him over Bucky’s excruciating cries when Tony rounds on him with an incredulous, murderous glare. “His brain is scrambled already, and you barrelling in and touching him is just gonna make it worse.”

It’s a fair point, but it doesn’t stop Tony wrenching his shoulders from Sam’s grasp with a low growl.

Then, as quickly as it started, Bucky stops howling. He collapses into a pile of limbs on the floor, panting breathlessly and with a wheeze to each inhalation that sounded incredibly awful. Bucky tips forwards onto his palms to press his sweating forehead against the cool relief of the tiles and slips his eyes closed.

And that, _that pain right there_ , is what causes Tony to lurch forwards to sit next to Bucky and place a hand on his shuddering back.

“You’re alright.” He murmurs, even though he’s fully aware that he sounds nowhere near encouraging. “Breathe, Buck, you’re safe.”

Bucky tries to catch his breath and fails. Instead, his throat makes a horrible squelching noise that has his whole-body convulsing like an electric shock. Sam guesses what’s about to happen before Tony does, and dives into the floor holding a plastic bowl to shove it under Bucky’s chin as the man vomits messily into the container.

Every fibre in Tony’s body wills him to squeal and back away, but the strong tidal wave of protection he feels towards this tornado of a man overrides it. Sam and Tony sit on the floor with him for a few more minutes as he throws up three more times, with the others standing guard at their heels in silent help.

“That’s so gross,” Bucky finally manages to croak out, and wipes a trembling hand across his face. His skin is flushed red raw, mostly from embarrassment. Tony literally kissed him a few minutes ago, and now he was watching him hurl his guts up for no reason. “I’m so, so sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Sam says quietly, and removes the bowl to empty the contents into the sink. “If you think we haven’t been in this position before, you’re wrong.”

Flashbacks of the nights post-break-up light up Tony’s mind and he has to groan at the fragile recollections. 

“What happened?” Bruce asks, and drops to his knees to take hold of Bucky’s wrist and monitor his heartrate.

“I don’t know.” Bucky mumbles and takes the glass of water Nat’s offering him. “No fucking clue.”

“Your pulse count is high, obviously, but other than that you aren’t showing any signs of physical distress.” Bruce mutters, and the concerned crease between his eyebrows deepens. “What did you feel?”

Bucky mewls when Tony helps him to his feet. He still looks a bit shaky, but his temperature was starting to settle. “It was like being electrocuted, but with fire. Like… being- it was like what being burned alive is like?”

Tony shakes his head tiredly. He gets Bucky sat down on a nearby sofa before dropping to the floor to kneel beside his legs and place a steady hand on the man’s knee. Bucky offers him a small smile as a thank you, but Tony isn’t paying enough attention to return it. “What, like a memory?”

Bruce makes an affirmative noise. “Yeah, perhaps it was a muscle spasm that made you think about Winter Soldier days?”

Bucky stiffens. “I don’t remember much about anything these days. My whole life is a hazy blur.”

Suddenly, Rhodey marches onto the communal floor from the elevator wearing an expression that Tony can only describe as his _apocalypse scowl_.

“The fuck is happenin’ here?” He exclaims, and Sam throws his hands in the air with uncertainty.

Tony just flits his eyes between his best friend and the elevator with his mouth slightly open. 

“How did you-”

“Nat texted me.” Rhodey interrupts and perches on the end of the coffee table to fix Bucky with a critical glare. “I need you to tell me exactly what was going through your mind when your little episode occurred.”

Tony raises his eyebrows at Nat, who salutes at him sarcastically back.

Bucky sighs and clenches his eyes shut in concentration. 

“I remember- I remember-” he begins but trails off in frustration. “I don’t know what I remember but it’s something, it has to be, I just-”

“What?” Tony coaxes, with his hand still firmly squeezing the man’s knee.

“Chains, around my wrists.” Bucky spits and grips his left wrist with his right fingers so hard it leaves grey welts lined with red pressed into the white skin. “I remember pain, excruciating, excruciating pain.”

“Worse than being experimented on, pain?” Rhodey asks firmly and chooses to ignore the daggers Tony sends him when he yanks his entire body round to grimace at his best friend.

Bucky looks like he’s about to throw up again, so Sam quietly places the emptied bowl next to Tony’s thigh just in case.

“Close enough.”

Tony drops his chin to his chest to sigh forcefully through his nose. The haunted waver to Bucky’s voice was like thousands of tiny pins dancing on his heart.

“But… Bucky, man, there weren’t any injuries to your wrists when we found you.” Sam interrupts slowly before gesturing to his neck. “You had cuts all over your neck and bruises, plus a burn on your upper arm but your forearms seemed fine.”

“You were fine just now, too.” Bruce adds gently. “No signs of elevated heartrate that seemed dangerous, your reflexes were okay when Tony helped you up, your speech was fluent… I don’t know. Somethin’ don’t- something doesn’t sit right with me about this.”

Rhodey sighs heavily and loosens his posture to dangle his arms between his knees.

“Me neither. Steve goes walkabouts and then this happens to Barnes? It must be connected, surely?”

“What,” Tony shuffles on his haunches. “You also reckon the people who could have Steve are the same people who took Buck?”

“It’s plausible.” Rhodey nods.

Bruce coughs. “Maybe these assholes did something to Bucky when they had him, to cause that pain?” 

Rhodey grumbles an agreement. “Maybe they’re doing the same thing to Steve?”

Tony doesn’t miss the sudden flash of terror that passes over Bruce’s features, nor does he not notice the panicked glare in Rhodey’s eyes when he twists round to face the scientist. 

“Absolutely not.” Bruce spits out straight away. “Not possible.”

“No,” Rhodey shakes his head adamantly. “There’s no way.”

Then, Bruce falters. “Except maybe there is?”

Rhodey actually groans and places his head in his hands.

“I don’t fucking believe this.”

“There’s a chance, especially with him missing.” Bruce fires back and slides two fingers up to his glasses to tip them from his nose. A hand comes up to massage his temples in exhaustion.

Tony’s eyes roll impatiently. “What?”

“Steve’s missing.” Bruce reminds him, but refuses to catch either his or Bucky’s panicked gaze. “They’re both serum enhanced, or as we like to say, ‘super soldiers’.”

“Spit it out, Banner.” Tony grinds dangerously.

“What if they’re not Bucky’s memories?” The physicist poses to the room. Tension explodes into the space as everyone stops breathing momentarily. “What if that’s Steve’s sub-conscious?”

Tony genuinely doesn’t know what to say.

“No,” Sam takes the first window to reply bravely. “Surely not.”

“But- w-why?” Bucky almost shrieks, his voice rising in octaves with every inhale. An awful, uncontrollable vibration rips through his skin and he looks to the simple eye like someone on crack. “Why the fuck would this be happening?”

“If someone’s got Steve, right after they took you…” Bruce trails off again as a wave of fragile enlightenment dawns over his expression. “Then they must need something from the both of you to use as experimentation. Maybe they didn’t find it with you, and now they need Steve. You were just the warm-up, and they see Steve as the golden power play. It’s a warning, they’re emulating his pain on you to warn you away. ‘This could’ve been you, count yourself lucky’ sort of thing?”

Bucky is fully aware that Bruce is just looking at a sea of blank, yet growing-in-fear-by-the-second faces. One quick glance to his side proves his theory; Tony’s own facial canvas dotted in murky greys with a dab of purple ringing his eyes.

“Well fuck this waiting around.” Nat spits, and gestures in exaggeration to the door. “I honestly don’t give a shit about Steve; he can rot in hell for all I care for what he did to Tony. However, I kinda give a huge shit about Earth, and if these psychos have got Steve, god knows what they’re planning. Look what happened the last time this sort of science got into the wrong hands.”

Everyone turns their heads to stare at Bucky pointedly, and he swallows heavily while feeling very small.

“We need to find him.” He confirms, and doesn’t miss the panicked look Tony and Sam share. They clearly don’t trust him to keep his emotions out of this one, but those assholes have got Steve _goddamnit_ and even if the guy is a complete waste of space, he’s supposed to be his best friend. 

Tony doesn’t let his gaze slide for a few seconds, before his mouth sets out into a grim line. “Okay.” He murmurs. “Avengers, assemble.”

-

“I won’t ask you again,” Steve growls, still desperately rattling the cuffs gripping his wrists to try and engage some sort of leeway. “What do you want from me?”

Ambia spins on his heels with an animalistic grin, his figure still obscured in the shadows. “You? What the fuck do you think I could possibly want from _you?_ ”

“I- I don’t understand-”

“Clearly not.” Ambia replies with a humoured snort. He edges closer and closer to Steve with a facetious manner that screamed smugness. He was obviously enjoying watching Steve grow increasingly frustrated and seemed to be getting off on it, the _motherfucker_. “You see, Rogers, I realised that sometimes in order to get what you want, you have to do things in a jumbled order. I want a burger? I’ll go and slaughter an animal myself instead of buying the damn thing. I want money? I’ll take it from other people instead of making my own. I want a super-soldier?-”

“You’ll kidnap one instead of asking politely?” Steve guesses sarcastically, and spits on the ground dangerously close to Ambia’s shoe. The maniac doesn’t even notice. Instead, his wide grin gets bigger until his teeth start eating into his cheekbones.

“Unbelievable, you spend a few years as Stark’s trophy husband and suddenly you think everything’s about you?”

Steve jangles the restraints angrily. “You clearly wanna do something with me otherwise you wouldn’t have-”

Then, his voice trails off into a pathetic whisper as everything falls shatteringly into place. Ambia licks his bottom lip and gnaws at the flesh patronisingly, a delighted gleam evident in his charcoal eyes.

“There we go. Looks like you aren’t as dumb as you look?”

“Bucky.” Steve whispers, brokenly; fear bubbling up into his chest at Ambia’s visual glee. “He’s the one you’re chasing, not me.”

“Romania was easy,” Ambia flicks some dust from his biceps and continues pacing around the room like a predator. Steve felt like prey, like he was about to be eaten. “All I did was ‘nap Barnes from Wakanda, inject him with a serum we’d found in an old HYDRA base and deposit him back in some mountains. Beat him nice and good too, you know, just to make it seem like we were looking for somethin’.”

Steve feels sick.

“What serum?”

The lunatic shrugs and then suddenly yawns, like the conversation about Bucky’s welfare was boring. His mouth cracks obscenely and Steve can see right through to his tonsils. “It never made it past the trial stages. My men found some old reports that said it had begun to melt its victims’ brains. Apparently, it was somethin’ to do with emotion telepathy. Not thoughts, feelings. Rumours had it that the serum could emotionally connect two people, and would you believe it, pain is an emotion!” Ambia claps his hands above his head like he’s just solved world hunger. “Now, I got to thinkin’- what would happen if I managed to create a pain link between two of the best human weapons on the planet?”

Steve kicks his legs out in restless fury. “You’re fucking insane. Why do you need both of us? You’re literally not making any sense.”

If madness could be physically seen on somebody’s features, then Ambia was a walking straight-jacket with the amount of pure crazy shining in his eyes.

“If I could connect both you and Barnes, then that’s a pain link I know either of you would do anything to destroy. I’read the stories, I know how close you motherfuckers are. If Barnes knew that his best friend, his ‘brother’, was in trouble, I’d bet my gold teeth on him searching hell an’ high water to save you. Then _bam _, HYDRA’s most prized possession: the lost asset, walks straight into my hands and I didn’t have to fight nobody or cause a worldwide search for a missing body to get it.”__

__All Steve can think about is the hatred masked on Bucky’s face when they’d last seen each other and he wonders whether Ambia was right or if Bucky would have to think twice about pissing on him if he was on fire._ _

__Ambia silently crouches down on his haunches in front of Steve and laces his fingers together over his knees. “Of course, Stark and his gang-bang of morons- or whatever th’ hell they’re called- get called in to go and rescue Barnes. See, I knew how much we would’ve scared him and that Nick Fury. I knew there was _no way_ they would allow Barnes to enter mainstream society again and I betted all my possessions on them locking him up at the compound. And look, they did! Lucky shot. The whole ‘new Captain America’ stuff was a bit of an obstacle in my plan ‘cos it ramped up Barnes’ publicity again, but never mind. All I had to do was snatch you from Leprechaun-land, and sit back and relax as Stark, with his huge ego and hero complex, and Barnes, the broken soldier who only knows how to follow orders, come straight to me. I purchased one Old Captain America and I get an entire team of valuable people in return. It’s funny what people will do for those they claim to hate, isn’t it?”_ _

__Steve wonders how much he’ll have to throw his neck forwards to head-butt the twat. Unfortunately, Ambia just grins at him again and reaches out to pat a grimy palm against his cheek. Steve yelps and kicks out at the man, but Ambia laughs and stands back up again to disappear into the shadows._ _

__“ _Fuck_.” Steve mutters to himself and hates how quickly restless tears spring to his eyes. He had absolutely nothing to defend to himself with. Everything had belonged to Cap. Not just the materialistic crap like the shield, but his strength and sharp mind too. He had spent years believing, gullibly, that the super-solider serum elements made him Steve. Now, chained to a wall with dirty metal digging into his wrists and absolutely no way to warn anybody that everyone was in danger, Steve realised how vulnerable he had let himself become. _ _

__He was a- a _civilian_ for fucks sake. He was weak._ _

__It had been his choice, to throw away Cap. It had been his choice, he reminds himself as anger crumples into pure fear, to be _nobody_._ _

__“Bucky, please don’t come looking for me.” He whispers gently to himself and huddles in as close as he can to hide the tears steadily streaming over his eyelashes. “Leave me here. Don’t put yourself in danger, Buck, I’ll- I’ll be o-okay. I’m sorry- I’m so sorry.”_ _

__Crippling, empty silence screams right back at him, and for the first time in over seventy years, Steve Rogers felt very, very alone._ _


	7. A Familiar Face

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony doesn't want help, but fuck does he need it.

“Stupid piece of _shit_ surveillance.” Tony hisses under his breath, every sharp exhale syncing with the quickfire clicking of the mouse. “Jesus _shitting_ Christ, look at all of these files without any proper labelling on them.”

Nat huffs over his shoulder with her eyes firmly trained on the pages and pages of folders containing documents simply marked with a number followed by a few random, out of sequence letters. “Remind me why Friday can’t just pull up the right CCTV file for us?”

“All of the files are stored in a random order.” Tony replies. His eyes burn against the stark artificial light from the screen, and he blinks rapidly to will away the dots blurring his vision. “The auditorium has its own surveillance not linked to the mainframe protecting the compound for safety reasons. Friday has less chance of pulling the right file from the press conference than I do.”

He wiggles the mouse in his grasp furiously out of pent-up anger, and Nat wonders how long it will be before she has to rip the bastard thing out of his grasp.

“Forgive me for sounding like a heathen,” she murmurs, eyes flicking around the screen at rapid speed. “But why can’t you just find out when the files were created and re-code the program to fish out the one that comes from the conference?”

Tony sighs and cups his forehead with his free hand. “Because the auditorium CCTV doesn’t work that way.”

Silence. “SHIELD doesn’t have a hold over this, does it?”

“Of course it fucking doesn’t,” Tony snorts, glaring at Nat through the blue illuminations with a disappointed frown. “What do you take me for? I programmed the goddamn surveillance to encrypt completely arbitrarily, which is why these document names are utterly random. The kid’s friend, Ned, helped with some weird hacking shit that removes the data signifying when the footage was collected, and disperses it through the code so nobody can work it out.” Then, he slams the mouse down on the desk and clasps both hands to his head with an almighty groan. “Why I didn’t sync it up with Friday, god only knows.”

Nat shakes her head. “You got Peter’s nerdy sidekick to essentially break your program as a security measure?”

She receives raised eyebrows to the high heavens for that. 

“I just told you there’s basically no chance of finding surveillance footage to identify the nutcase who we assume has taken Steve, and a teenager is your priority?” He says, in slight disbelief.

“Well, why is Steve your priority?” Nat glares with a pinched look to signify concern. Tony _hates_ that look. That look had haunted him through many sleepless nights; that pitying glance that seemed to whisper _why are you hurting yourself like this?_

A sigh. “Widow-”

“My actual priority is that you don’t have easy access to the CCTV protecting the kids who put on shows at that place.” The redhead assassin grumbles quietly. Tony rolls his eyes but pretends not to hear her- after all, he had bigger fish to fry. 

The last twenty-four hours had been a complete mess. After the conversation that had ended with Rhodey and Bruce making wild hypotheses about Bucky’s weird-ass seizure and the connection with Steve’s disappearance, they’d both holed themselves up in Bruce’s lab to run tests. Seeing Bucky in pain was _not_ something Tony ever wanted to see again. His lips begin to burn with the phantom tingle of the new Captain America’s tongue running against the seams, and Tony shivers under his clothing. Nat clocks his jitters and frowns quietly to herself, but doesn’t make any move to break the tense silence. She watches as Tony continues to frantically attempt to solve the auditorium’s surveillance issues with incandescent desperation. 

Sam storms into the lab with a notepad grasped in his hands. He slams it down on the desk Tony’s sat at, making the engineer jump out of his skin and swear like a banshee. 

“You were taking too fucking long,” Sam says, shrugging nonchalantly even though Tony’s about three seconds from tearing his face off. “So I contacted Spiderdude’s weird friend to work out how we can bypass the shitty encryption you idiots installed.”

“ _Shitty encryption-_ ” Tony starts to seethe but Nat interrupts him by banging on the screen with her knuckles. 

“Let’s go, Mr Firewall.” 

Tony blows air out his nostrils sharply. His eyes scan the haphazard scrawl of Ned’s mind-blurt on the paper, slowly deducing which bits of code Ned seemed to think could be reversed. 

“Okay.” He mutters to himself, and pulls up the right surveillance program to filter through the code. It takes a few minutes, but eventually he finds the line Ned’s referencing. Sam and Nat exchange a confused glance as Tony meddles with the keyboard until finally, _finally_ , he flicks back to the hundreds of jumbled documents. Right at the top, with the date of the press conference branded across it like a white flag, is a file marked 11SSQ.

“Huh.” Nat mumbles. “Save Steve Quickly. Should’ve guessed.” 

Tony snorts involuntarily at that. Exhaustion pulsates behind his eyes and he secretly yearns to have a glass of something strong weighted in his hand, but this shit was serious. Deadly serious; just like it always is when Steve’s involved. 

Sam raises his eyebrows when Tony arches his neck to glance backwards at him. “Grab Bucky for me, please?”

He gets a nod in reply, and Sam disappears off into the elevator with his jaw ground tight. When he returns, Bucky is following him with the wide eyes of an orphaned animal, all pools of dark sadness and weariness over what the fuck next. Something clenches at Tony’s heart, but he steels himself to stay concentrated. Find that leather-wearing freak first, then protect the guy who has nearly killed him on several occasions and now wants to rip the clothes from. Ahem.

“You alright?” He can’t help but ask. Bucky sends him an encouraging nod, and flexes his fingers against his waist.

“I’m fine. I don’t feel like I’m gonna pass out anymore. What’s up?”

“We’ve managed to find the CCTV file from the night of the press conference.” Tony nods. The file in question fills the huge screen intimidatingly, six squares of equal size slicing the images up from the six main cameras. The entire auditorium (apart from the small dressing rooms, of course) is accounted for. Bucky’s eyes immediately travel to the frame displaying the footage of the circular seating. 

“Okay.”

“We need you to try and point out the shifty man you remember seeing.” Nat pipes up, her voice soft. She gestures at the lab’s door with her head. “An’ Rhodey will pull in all his favours with the UN to see if we can put a name to the face.”

Sam snorts. “If Fury finds out we haven’t consulted him first, shit will go down.”

“Fury can get fucked.” Tony murmurs, and sets about clicking away to find where the footage picked up the beginning of the event. It takes a moment, but he eventually finds Pepper scurrying around the seats towards the doors to let the guests in. He flicks his focus to Bucky, and selects the necessary button to play the beginning of the tapes. “Eyes up, man of steel, shout when you see him.”

Bucky sighs and leans forward to rest his hands on the back of Tony’s chair. With him this close, Tony can practically taste him. He smells like a heady mix of aftershave, coffee and smoke and Tony has to grit his jaw to stop himself from blurting out something creepy. In the reflection of the screen, he can see that Bucky’s eyebrows are softly furrowed over the piercing gaze he has on the footage. His bottom lip is caught up in his teeth; white diamond dragging over pink plumpness. 

_Damnit Stark, pull yourself together._

Tony knows he’s suddenly tensed up, and within in a second he can feel Bucky’s concerned gaze melting a hole in the back of his neck. Then-

“Leather jacket!” Sam exclaims out of absolutely nowhere, pointing a long index finger at the media. Tony scrambles to pause the CCTV, and then increase the page so that the frame from the main camera swallows up the entire space. Bucky sidles around the chair to peer invasively at the tableau.

“That’s him.” He decides after only a few seconds. Tony leans in and stares at the man. Bucky was right about that crazed look- the stranger seemed to have unfocused pupils and a nasty snarl hiding under his nonchalant façade. Blotted tattoos of incestuous colours stretched up the left side of his neck, and Tony thanked every deity imaginable that they had at least one defining feature. Hopefully, that was going to make identifying him a whole lot easier. 

“Jesus, what an oddball.”

“Tony, play the footage a bit more?” Bucky asks him, still fixated on the screen. Tony obeys, and his throat tightens as around five more men dressed in leather wander into the auditorium within a fifteen-minute time span. Fuck, Bucky had been right. 

“This can’t be good, boys.” Nat interjects. She shuffles her weight onto her relaxed foot until she’s subconsciously standing in a battle pose. 

“Incoming call from Nick Fury, boss.” Friday suddenly chimes in from the ceiling, and it takes a moment for Tony to remember that he’d connected his phone to her to see if his trusty right-hand girl could find a way to debug the surveillance with his own work. She had gotten annoyed when she couldn’t find a way to bypass Ned’s protective barriers, so had been scrolling through Tony’s photo album instead. 

“Oh fuck.” Tony directs at the rafters, and wipes a hand over his eyes. “Put him through, please, Fri.”

“Yes, boss.” Comes the reply and then suddenly after a monotonous beep, Fury’s gravelly tones were drifting through the lab.

“I’ve been talking to Colonel Rhodes.” He sounds almost smug, like he’s pleased with himself for getting to the Avengers without having to batter through Tony’s stubborn nature. 

“Congratulations?” Tony replies, drily. Nat rolls her eyes. 

“I hear Steve Rogers is now a missing person?” 

“It doesn’t matter what you’ve heard.” Tony snaps. His eyes stray to the still image of the auditorium audience and the six similar men marring the crowd. “I’m- _we’re_ \- sorting it.”

Fury has the audacity to audibly scoff over the line, and Bucky’s fists clench. “You mean, you’re shitting yourself because you think you’re dealing with the same people who took the Winter Soldier? Oh, who is under _your_ protection by the way.”

“What do you want, Fury?” Tony gets up from his seat to transfer the image on the computer screen to the main floor with a flick of his wrist. Friday silently blows up the freezeframe of their suspects into hologram form, and the men look even more questionable life-sized. 

“Rhodes refused to tell me all of the details, so I decided to extend an olive branch and do some digging of my own.” It’s clear that by ‘I’, Fury means all of his little keyboard warriors slaving away at SHIELD. “The Irish police don’t know about Rogers’ disappearance, funnily enough.”

“Alannah hasn’t reported it?” Nat enquires in confusion. Tony shrugs, but he’s unnerved. 

“She said to me that they wouldn’t take it seriously. Maybe it’s a good thing that she’s leaving it to us?”

“Stark.” Fury then cuts in, sounding exasperated. “Do you want this bit of help or not?”

Tony forms his mouth to say no, but one look at Bucky’s sharp expression causes him to deflate and resignedly say: “Just this once.”

“We’ve managed to find surveillance footage of Rogers being followed by somebody into a park near his home.”

Tony stops dead. “Fuck-”

“It’s grainy, the CCTV is from a small corner shop with elderly owners, but it’s definitely Rogers. We can’t identify the target stalking him, but hopefully your investigation will provide some answers.” Fury practically purrs. 

Tony’s genuinely afraid to ask. “This suspect… were they wearing a leather jacket by any chance?”

There’s a pause, and when Fury answers he sounds positively _gleeful_. “They were, actually. Look at that, your Avengers are on the correct path for once!”

Bucky looks how Tony feels: horrified and nauseous. Christ, this gang had Steve. They’d sat in Tony’s auditorium when Bucky was at his most vulnerable and they’d surveyed it all like predators. 

“Sick fucking bastards.” Sam growls under his breath, his eyes practically gleaming with hatred. 

“Glad I could be of assistance.” Fury says. Tony smacks a hand down on the nearest desk, the sound exploding off of every wall like a gunshot. 

“God, tell your voice to stop being so smug.” He snaps, and flips off the area containing the vicinity of Fury’s voice. “Friday, end call.”

The line clicks dead, and Friday goes quiet. A tense silence unfurls throughout the lab, and Bucky attempts to break it by sidling up to Tony and placing a warm hand on the shorter man’s waist.

“I know you hate Fury, and you don’t want SHIELD to be involved with us, but with something as big as this, you should probably nab all the help y’can get.”

Tony stifles a laugh and instead presses closer to the warm palm cupping his hipbone. “You sound like Steve.”

“Gross.” Bucky replies immediately, in jest. His eyes are sparkling with the need to drift back to normality when Tony tilts his gaze towards him. “Don’t say that.” 

With all the subtlety of Thor at a party, Nat clears her throat. She jabs Sam in the ribs and begins to push him towards the elevator doors. “Clint and Thor should be back soon, so we can debrief them when they’re back. For now we’ll go and comb through our intel to see if we can identify our target.”

Tony throws her a grateful smile as they leave. The confusion on Sam’s oblivious face is to die for. “Uh-huh, thanks Nat.”

The silver doors slide closed as the familiar thrum of the mechanics jarring into motion fills the lab. Tony refocuses on the huge surveillance snippet and lets out a sharp exhale.

“If that is the piece of shit that hurt you…” He mutters, but trails off when he feels the vulnerability warm his cheeks. Bucky lets out a soft sound that borders on a whine, before stepping completely behind Tony to plaster himself against the man’s back. He winds his long arms around Tony’s midriff and hooks his chin over a muscly shoulder. Tony shudders at the way Bucky’s hands are splayed out over his abdomen, _possessive_ but quite comforting at the same time.

“This isn’t about me. This is about Steve. Nat’s right, if our science gets into the wrong hands it’s gonna be a fucking nightmare.” His voice sounds a few octaves lower than usual and it sends a laser beam piercing through Tony’s body.

He ends up just sighing and leaning his head back so that their necks are adjacent. “I’m sorry you’ve been dragged into this.”

“You are joking?” Bucky doesn’t lift his head, instead he just pokes Tony in the belly button to make him yelp. “You couldn’t have controlled any of this.”

It’s true. Tony couldn’t have stopped Bucky being kidnapped from Wakanda, he couldn’t have changed Steve’s outlook on the Cap situation and he certainly couldn't have known who exactly he was inviting into his property at the conference.

Yet, anything that involved Bucky provoked this animalistic need to shelter the taller guy. It was such an unexpected feeling after the last three years, mostly because Tony hadn’t felt that way towards anyone since… yeah. Bucky was different. Different was good. 

“M’still apologising.” He yields. 

“Well don’t.” Bucky tells him, and decides to press a hot kiss to ridge of Tony’s collarbone. With little intimacy since having his heart broken, Tony’s mortified to feel himself melt into Bucky’s hold like a lovestruck teenager. Where was Tony Stark, Sexual Connoisseur? Holy fuck, was he really getting hard from _that_?

Broken Bucky, the shell of a person he’d been when they’d found him in the mountains, burns through his eyelids when he slips his eyes closed for a heartbeat. It wasn’t fucking fair to sweep the man up in his gangbang nature, he had amnesia! Tony forces his eyes open, and his heartrate to slow down. Nothing heavy could happen, yet. Not whilst they had a super-soldier thief on the loose.

“Friday, swipe up my recent calls and find the one incoming from Ireland please.” 

Bucky clearly notices Tony’s sphere change from raw to guarded and pulls back his octopus limbs with a sniff. The irritating sound of dialling thunders from the ceiling, and after six rings it finally connects. 

“Tony?”

Alannah sounds _haggard_. Pain fills her every breath in a vice-grip, and it was exhausting to even listen to her. 

“Hey, Alannah. Sorry to disturb you, I just-”

“Have you found him yet?” She bulldozers through the calm with shaking vowels. Tony makes a face at the frozen CCTV, and hopes to God she can’t hear his hesitation. “It’s just, not only am I losing my mind, but I’m having to pretend that we’re both fine even though I’m running out of excuses to Steve’s friends about why he can’t join them for a pint an’-”

“Breathe.” Tony finds himself ordering. She does, a slow and tortuous breathy thing that sounds way too close to a shallow panic attack. “We’re making headway, but nothing concrete. I’ll let you know when I have more information.”

“When you find the bastard,” she grinds out, suddenly going from terrified to dangerous. “Let me join you when you knock on their door. I’m not stupid- you know who, _what,_ I am. Steve taught me to defend myself, and nothing would bring me greater joy than roundhouse kicking his kidnapper right between the fuckin’ eyes.”

Bucky raises his eyebrows at that, seemingly leaving Tony to deal with it.

“I’ll uh, ye-yeah, I’ll let you know what’s happening.” He splutters. “Listen, Alannah, you haven’t reported Steve missing yet, have you?”

“To the police?” Alannah sounds disgusted at the notion. “Course not, they’d be useless compared to you lot.”

Tony chuckles. “Smart girl. Look, I’m just calling to ask that it stays that way. Our intel is gonna be secretive and not exactly in line with GDPR regulations over there so it’s best that the cops don’t get wind of the situation.”

The line quietens momentarily, before Alannah clears her throat wetly. “I understand. I’ll do my best to act like there’s nothing wrong but… ah shit, Tony you need to find him. Please. You know what it’s like to be me right now.”

And yeah, he does. Tony knows what it’s like to not know if the person you’re in love with is dead or alive. He knows what it’s like to try and sleep with that person plaguing your thoughts night after night. He’s familiar with the feeling of not being able to breathe through the worry. 

“I do.” He mutters, suddenly very numb. “I’ve been there, Alannah. I’ll do my best, I promise.”

She thanks him, and Tony ends the call with a soft goodbye. Bucky doesn’t say anything, he just fixes Tony with a knowing gaze and crosses his arms. 

“Don’t look at me like that.” He grumbles. The CCTV hologram snapshot dissolves into thin air when Tony slides his fingers down the atmosphere to dissemble it. They’re left with an empty lab that tastes like tension and metal. 

“You okay?” Bucky tilts his head to the side lightly and Tony shrugs. 

“I’ve gotta be.” 

Tony regards him for a second before he ambles towards the icy brunette until they’re standing nose to nose. Bucky gasps a little when Tony arches his neck up to capture his lips in a deep and languid kiss. His lips are warm and surprisingly soft considering he’s been biting them for the last twenty-four hours. Tony smiles into the kiss when Bucky reaches round to draw him closer by his ass as their waists bump together invitingly. 

They trade lazy kisses for a few minutes. Tony pulls back to gaze at Bucky through hooded eyelids as his mouth quirks up into a sated smile. 

“Don’t go anywhere.” He hears himself saying. Bucky’s expression folds into confusion before evening out into a picture of understanding that borders on sadness. Tony was asking him to stay present; both physically and emotionally. Don’t get kidnapped again and don’t get swept up by Steve, is what he actually means.

A pause settles on them both. Then, Bucky promises, “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else”, and that’s enough. 

-

“Tony.” Clint says a few hours later, dressed in the typical post-mission attire of an oversized hoodie and grey sweats. Tony looks up at his name and wanders over to where Clint is pouring over a hologram folder Friday has projected for him. He flicks through every compartment with his index and middle finger in quick succession until he’s gone through the whole thing. “We’ve got no record of any chemical warfare compounds in circulation at the moment that could explain Barnes’ symptoms.”

Tony sighs heavily and kneads a fist into his right temple. This was exactly what he’d hoped _wouldn’t_ be the case. “Fuck. Uh, okay. We kinda need SHIELD’s records of HYDRA weapons to rule out their comeback.”

Clint gives him a side-eye that sticks. “That’s a wildly different attitude to the last three years?”

“Yeah, well-” Tony’s flicks his eyes to Rhodey and Bruce appearing out of the elevator from Bruce’s lab. “I’m running out of options here.” Bruce nods at them both in greeting and leans on nearest counter with a groan. “Any progress?”

Bruce shakes his head. “I can’t work out any way that Steve and Bucky could be connected. I’ve never come across _anything_ that could have that ability.”

“There’s nothing in our records.” Clint nods at the many compounds strewn across the air from Friday.

“Alien?” Tony poses.

Bruce grimaces. The glasses perched on the top of his head shudder with the expression. “I hope not.”

“Nat showed me the CCTV of the tattooed guy,” Clint looks sceptical at Bruce’s uncertainty. “He looked very human to me?”

“That’s what I assumed.” Bruce agrees, clearly still deep in thought. The skin between his eyebrows puckers when he frowns in symmetrical pleats. “I need some time.”

“Which unfortunately is not something we have.” Rhodey pipes up from somewhere to Tony’s left. His phone dangles between his fingers dangerously, and Tony eyes it up knowingly.

“Ready to pull in every favour you possibly can from your pals at the UN?”

Rhodey huffs and fixes his oldest friend with a glare. “I still don’t know why I’m throwing away all my favours for _Steve_ of all people.”

“You’re doing this for Bucky, which means you’re doing it for me.” Tony bats back with a tone too sharp to be missed. Bruce and Clint turn to look at him in surprise at that too, which causes him to freeze and furiously backtrack. “Because, uh- well, he’s been entrusted under the care of the Avengers, so if he’s in trouble then we all suffer.”

Phew, smooth save, Stark.

Rhodey, ever the military hero, looks Tony up and down with rich criticism like he’s a scolding a child. For a moment, it looks like he’s going to say something but he chooses to grit his jaw shut and leave Tony to bask in his façade of normality. 

“Alright. Give me time to ask the assholes, and then I’ll bring you whatever they offer.”

With a steely nod at the three men, he marches off, dialling as his goes. Having a friend who had their fingers in so many different government pies could be very rewarding.

Yet five days later found Tony restless and worried. 

He’s sat in his lab, tinkering away with Bruce over updated nanites when Rhodey flaps through the elevator doors in a hurry. A huge shit-eating grin climbs up his face as he drops a brown CLASSIFIED file down in front of the scientists, and then takes a seat next to Thor (who’s passing time trying to annoy Tony and clear out his last supply of ramen) to extend his arms in victory.

“You, Tony Stark, are welcome.”

Tony eyes the file suspiciously, his mosaic eyes flitting up to Rhodey’s Cheshire grin slowly. 

“No way.”

“Jackson Montague-Jones, forty-five years old from the depths of Illinois. Apparently he goes by Jax Ambia, which was his mother’s maiden name. Orphaned at fifteen and first strayed onto local police records at sixteen for shit like petty theft and car crime. He enrolled at MIT in ‘97 but only managed a year before he dropped out. After that, he disappeared. Went off the radar, just like _that_.” Rhodey snaps his fingers in tandem with the emphasis, the sound pinging from the metal rafters loudly. Thor listens to him and turns away with a grunt, the fork in his hand crunching under his grip.

“MIT?” Tony reiterates, surprised. 

Bruce’s eyebrows furrow together. “A scientist.”

Picking up on Bruce’s tone, Tony nods slowly as the possibility dawns on him. “Smart enough to get into MIT… smart enough to engineer a chemical weapon strong enough to turn enhanced soldiers into vegetables?”

“That’s a bit of a jump,” Rhodey snorts, and reaches over to flick through the folder until he finds what he’s looking for and smooths out the spine to press the pages against the cold surface. “The latest photo the UN could obtain was his MIT photo ID, and luckily Ambia decided to get the beginnings of his colourful tattoo done at a young age.”

Tony peers over Rhodey’s splayed fingers to study the photo. The guy from the press conference, _Jax Ambia_ , stares back at him with a tight jaw and blown pupils. Even at this age, the beginning of that unhinged look was already marring his gaze. 

“Jesus.” Bruce mutters. “What a kid.”

“Does Fury know about this?” Tony taps the document with his nail.

He gets raised eyebrows from Rhodey as the man sighs and refuses to make eye contact. “Most probably. SHIELD and the UN have become extremely intertwined in recent years as you know.”

Tony frowns in irritation but wisely doesn’t say anything; after all, it’s nothing to do with Rhodey and his involvement with the government.

“At least we have a name to assign to the face.” Thor says around a mouthful of noodles. “As you mortals say.”

“It’s a start.” Tony concedes, and closes the file to slide across the surface and into Rhodey’s waiting hands. “At least we can n- fuck _me_ -” 

His focus is suddenly commandeered by Bucky pacing into the lab. The man looks absolutely awful; his pallor was deathly grey and the hair behind his ears stuck to his skin in clumped tendrils of dark. Shivers racked his body in waves, and one look into his eyes was similar to staring at an optical illusion. His pupils seemed to swirl together in rotating form as an obvious sign to horrific dizziness.

“What the hell’s happened to you?”

“There’s a drill blowing holes through my skull.” He responds to Tony’s panicked demand mournfully. Every blink drove flames into his synapses to lick at his eye-sockets. 

“Migraine?” Rhodey asks optimistically, but one dirty look from Bruce has him cowering back against the wall. 

“This is a warning.” Bruce mutters, mostly to himself. “Steve’s in trouble.”

“Right now, Bucky is in trouble.” Tony fires back. He gets Thor to vacate his chair with vigorous flapping motions and all but forces Bucky into the seat. The man plants his palms at his forehead and starts gently rocking from side to side to try and alleviate the pain. “Who gives a fuck about Steve!”

“Tones-” Rhodey admonishes but Bucky overpowers his voice with an elongated whine around clenched teeth.

Bruce shakes his head and pushes Tony aside to crouch down in front of Bucky to assess him. “Is this the first headache you’ve had since your vomiting episode?”

Tony expects Bucky to nod and complain about how excruciating it is, so his heart breaks a little bit when the taller man murmurs the negative into his hands.

“They’ve been on and off.” He mutters. “This is the worst one. It feels like my head’s in a clay oven.” 

“You should’ve said something.” Bruce says in disappointment. Then, he rises back up and looks apologetically at Tony. “We don’t know what’s causing it so I don’t know how to treat it. Normal painkillers won’t work on him, but if I try and cook something up then we risk straying into the danger zone.”

Not being able to help Bucky was devastating, but not even being able to try was worse.

“I shall go back to the new Asgard.” Thor says out of nowhere, throwing his empty bowl onto the table with a clatter. “I believe it may be worth asking Valkyrie if she has ever heard of such a compound that can connect two people this way.”

Bucky sends him a blind thumbs up, and Tony thanks him. He thunders off towards the elevator with Rhodey following behind, file tucked firmly under his arm. With one last gentle pat to Bucky’s shoulder, Bruce follows them out too. 

“You’re shit at communicating.” Tony points out when the entrance slides closed.

Bucky snorts, and then moans when the vibration rattles his skull. “M’sorry.”

“We’ll find Steve, and we’ll cure you.”

“This may have nothing to do with Steve.” Bucky theorises from his inner elbows. “This may be my punishment from some vigilantes.”

That causes Tony to freeze. He regards Bucky’s cowering posture, and can’t believe what he’s hearing.

“Let me make this very clear: you do not deserve to be in pain.”

“No?” Bucky lifts his head up and stares at Tony with huge, shining eyes like a Disney character. “After what I’ve done?”

“Buck-”

“They may even be doing the world a favour?”

“Shut up.” Tony demands sharply, and Bucky snaps his mouth shut at the venom lacing the words. The tension clinging to the edges of his face looked to be genuinely painful, and Tony’s heart hurts for the man. Something was very, very wrong. Bucky’s naïve attempt at brushing off the theories wasn’t at all helpful. If anything, he was excusing Ambia’s actions and that was not something to be tolerated. Especially as Tony cared for him as fiercely as fire.

His phone starts to buzz in his pocket and he takes it out with a restless grunt. One look at the caller ID has him swearing to himself in caveman growls.

“Fury.” Tony says tiredly as a greeting when he eventually accepts the call. “Please tell me you’ve got good news.”

“You know what, Stark?” Fury sounds like he’s actually _smiling_ when he replies after a short pause, and Tony has to peer out of the window to check pigs aren’t flying around the compound. “I just think I might have.”

Friday pipes up just as Tony starts to roll his eyes in annoyance. “Incoming file from Nick Fury, sir, SHIELD verified.”

Tony wedges his phone between his ear and shoulder to drag up the aforementioned document into holographic form with both of his index fingers. The pixels start to materialise into an odd-looking ball that stretches and curves until Tony’s staring at a familiar shape. 

“Why am I looking at a map of the UK?” He directs into the phone. Friday zooms in on the figure until the borders of Scotland and Wales, as well as Northern Ireland, melt away leaving the minute dot that was England vibrating in blue. Then, a red circle begins to pulsate towards the upper part of the land like a radar signal. “Uh, where the fuck is that?”

“Intel has placed CCTV evidence of your man Ambia and his leather-fetish groupies right into our hands. Highlighted on the map is an area known as The Lake District, where our suspect was identified around four days ago.” Fury tells him cheerfully. He’s probably reclined in that chair now with a gleeful grin etched into that smug face, enjoying every moment of this wild goose-chase like a motherfucker. “How do you fancy another vacation?”

Tony hangs up wordlessly before walking through the hologram with a cursed yell, shattering the artificial map into fragments of cuboid dust.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry there's so much dialogue in this part, but I felt like a few gaps had to be filled before we stray into the action-heavy chapters.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed- I'm super excited to properly get into this!


End file.
